Walking the Roads
Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up somewhere else.” This quote gets changed around a bit, depending on the source, but the gist is always the same. I didn’t immediately recognize this as a statement on goal setting, that if you don’t aim for a particular goal, you might not like your results. Recently, though, the full meaning hit me in a major way as I trekked, lost, through the streets of Bricktown in Oklahoma City.
I was headed to a conference. My work had been unfocused as of late, and in similar form, I had signed up for the conference at the last minute. The hotel was completely booked, so I was staying at another place a mile away. No problem, I could use the walks to clear my head. Knowing it was predicted to be the most frigid weekend of an already colder-than-normal winter, I packed boots, gloves and my extra-long scarf.
After securing directions from the concierge, I headed out into the tundra, determined to start a new chapter in my life – again. It wasn’t the first time I’d gone off the rails a bit. What can I say? I get distracted. I let life and all its obstacles get in my way. When the computer crashes, I bemoan my luck and inability to work, ignoring for the moment that I’ve always preferred to write longhand. From the death of my blue ALL-CAPS typewriter in second grade until my first word processor in college, I did all of my writing that way, long and scrawling in notebooks, binders and assorted scraps of napkins and post-its.
When times are hard, I can’t afford to send off submissions and enter writing contests. When I’m stable financially, I’m way too busy to write like I should… There’s an endless cycle of barricades and excuses and – well Life. Like bad directions that take you far out of your way on the coldest day of the year, like a hotel with a new name that no one seems to have heard of before, like an icy brick street that takes you down in the middle of an intersection.
So as I continued on to my conference that day I had made a decision. I wasn’t going to let Life get in my way anymore. I was going to make time to write consistently. I was going to enjoy it, even the pieces I would later trash. I was going to use Life’s hurdles as fodder for my work. I was going to remind myself constantly that the only way to be a successful writer is to WRITE, and taking any other path would not get me where I wanted to go.
As I passed the American Banjo Museum, I finally neared my destination. Music was piping into the street. “How many roads must a man walk down…” And I laughed out loud, knowing I would write about that later.
