What do you thirst for? What direction should you go?
Does the road feel undulating and long, wide open, yet stifling?
When you can’t see ahead, does it make you nervous, uneasy?
I often feel like I am at once on an endless roller coaster that I will never be allowed to exit, and propelled at bullet speed across an expansive desert stretching to the ends of space and time. Just when I think I can see ahead to where I am going, the ride enters an invisible tunnel and makes sudden jolting turns and corkscrew loops.
I am in this vast desert on this endless ride going nowhere in particular. I am not in control. Should I jump? If I jump in the desert in the middle of nowhere, will I survive? Should I scream? Should I just hang on?
I make the best of it. I hang on. I try to plan for a jump, and I may even accomplish a jump of sorts, but inevitably I land in another roller coaster car and continue to wait and see where it will take me.
When I think I am in control, making the choices that will plot a course, here comes an unseen tunnel and the crazy changes that follow.
Some people are better at making decisions that put them on a different, gentler ride, or somehow seem able to avoid the ride altogether. They are sipping mocktails while floating in bliss on lazy rivers with twinkly lights and good shopping in the background. Some of them aren’t even aware of the death coaster whipping by.
Maybe they aren’t better at decisions. Maybe they are better at faking it. Maybe they stumbled into decisions that set them up to avoid the out-of-control life coaster. Maybe they were lucky. Maybe they were blessed.
Maybe we on the topsy-turvy wild ride are lucky, blessed, in different ways. Maybe it is an intricate series of tests, and we are all entered into different meets on different teams. Maybe there will be medals and trophies at the end for endurance, patience, perseverance. Maybe there will be ever-quenching fizzy water and sweet serenity up ahead. Perhaps a yellow polka-dot bathing suit, an inner tube, and a ticket to the lazy river ride.
How do we choose which ride to enter? How do we find a way to stop the ride and get off to make different ride choices later? Does it all matter? What are we willing to risk, to lose, to give? What do we hope to gain?
There are more questions than answers.
When all else fails, I practice joy and gratitude for the good things. Coffee. Bring more coffee. Music. Crank up the music. Open air. Roll down the windows and let our hair blow free. Loved ones to sit next to me in this rattletrap of a ride.