Have you ever felt like your life was going nowhere, and then the wheels on your car start literally spinning in place?
Have you been feeling like its been too long since you’ve dealt with your basic issues, and then realized the basement in your house is full of crap?
Have you had moments in life when the way you were feeling figuratively had strange parallels with your physical reality?
I make a point of them. Once I did make an actual mountain out of a molehill. It was a very small mountain.
I once dated a girl who was a few years younger than I. She was in college and got a summer job where I worked. We clicked really well and had a lot of fun together. I could have fallen really hard for her, but we just weren’t at the same place in life or looking for the same things in the long term.
On the last night before she had to leave to go back to school, she spent the night at my place, and I had to go to work that morning. We left at the same time, and for several miles our route was the same and we stayed in sight of one another. Until the highway split. I took the right fork; she took the left.
But for just a little while, we were going the same direction down the same road, and it was nice.
I was at the Sheraton in Baghdad in 2006. This was at the height of the sectarian violence when there were bombings and fighting every day. These two Iraqi construction workers were having a heated argument in Arabic about something and this US soldier points his M16 at them and starts screaming “stop fighting! stop fighting!” and I instantly saw it for what it was, the basis for our policy in Iraq at the time.
I frequently find myself taking the road less traveled by.
Especially at rush hour.