Recalculating . . .

In all our lives there are things that we go through where choices were made, right or wrong that sends us on life’s journey down a path or several paths in my case.  In this walk through our life’s experiences they come at you like seeing a 70 mm Cinerama movie (three curved screens with 3 projectors) for the first time at the theater when you were a child. Mine was “How the West was Won”.  Life in full surround with everything filling all your senses, both good and bad.

Robert Frost said in “The Road Not Taken”:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

In this internet age with instant communication, directions, and our hectic schedules we tend to lose something of ourselves as we try to do for others and tweak our lives to do better with things “the next time” or search out the Zen in each of us to follow a better path.  I have found that we all sometimes need that one “word” to set our course.  Oddly I found it from a distant friend whose voice is heard around the world and forever it seems in the Atlanta International Airport. It comes courtesy of our loyal robot driving companion — the Global Positioning System (GPS) and on our iphone’s as the voice of Siri — composed and focused as we stumble our way to appointments, trips, and rants sometimes messing up and hearing that word as we make our way. 

That word is “recalculating”.

Like most technology, the GPS merely amplifies our humanness. Do we trust her or stop and ask directions?  Most men will continue for miles before being led back in the right direction. What’s more, sooner or later, it may become a player in the drama.  I’ve seen grown men screaming at their GPS when they have chosen not to listen or believe the directions given them. There are no whys in GPS land. There is just a start point and an end point, and they keep changing making it easy to navigate between home and somewhere “out there” and back again.  The end becomes the new start, and vice-versa. Apple and Google Maps, in both you can switch the departure and arrival points with a handy swap icon. 

If you space out losing faith in the satellite map — that view from the stars above, the GPS view on the screen on your dash — when you suddenly cut off too early on the exit you need, or space out in conversation with a passenger missing the exit altogether, the GPS does not ask what caused you to make such a mistake.  It whirs the screen for a split second and says: “Recalculating”.

It’s all about choices in life.  Siri made a certain logistical suggestion of a route for you to take.  You chose to follow, which it took in stride, taking it neither an indication of your unresponsiveness nor of your good sense. But then you chose to stray.  There was nothing immoral in that, either.  A line just didn’t match another line.  It happens in life.  And when trajectories don’t match — when you have one expectation and I have another — we’re still in it together; there’s nothing for it but to change. To adapt. To “recalculate”. 

And the GPS does so. With Zen-like equanimity.  “Recalculating”. It might just be that easy. You didn’t do what I thought you’d do, what I hoped you’d do, what I longed for you to do. And I didn’t do what you thought, hoped and longed for me to do.  It was impossible.  We were human.  “Recalculating”. 

Presto: a new route.  Nothing to forgive or resent; nothing to fear or control. Just a new route.  Sure, you can hear smugness or impatience in the GPS “recalculating” voice if you choose.  But you can also hear the wisdom of the heavens, from which the way finding satellites gaze down at our tangled human streets.

For this time in my life I am “Recalculating”.  On a journey to maybe go back and find that other road, the one “not taken” so long ago. Or in this search to adjust attitudes, latitudes, and balance. Possibilities I will open my arms to what’s in store for me.

Ice