The Road Ahead
Consumed by the unpredictability of life, I’ve lost touch with the beauty this world has to offer.
For me, unpredictability is much more than not knowing what tomorrow has in store. It’s a lack of control that throws my mind into a whirlwind of what-ifs. It’s a stressful force that ends in preemptive conclusions. It’s a pressure to analyze every possible outcome.
The vulnerability in sharing such deep mental analyses over the past three months has uncovered my greatest fear and how I handle it. These reflections have resulted in the following conclusion: unpredictability is like an ivy seed planted in my brain, growing as time passes and slowly surrounding my neurons like the branches of a tree.
As the ivy grows it restricts circulation to rational thinking. Unaware of the inflicted damage, my mentality shifts to favor short-term solutions so that I can move on to the next issue as fast as possible. Each problem that enters my mind is a new ivy seed that accelerates mental suffocation.
This subconscious stress has made it difficult to fully appreciate the good in life. Unpredictability has been the one thing preventing me from living in the moment. Worries about the past and future have built a gate around the experiences and people that exist in the present.
Despite my longing to control the past and future, such a feat is unattainable. These past few months of vulnerability and reflection have helped me understand and accept that some things are simply out of my hands.
Looking out over this cliff, I noticed a parallel between the sweeping landscape and my realization. Like the highway that stretched in the distance, life is only visible for a few miles in the future until it curves out of sight. These curves are necessary to avoid the mountains of hardship that extend across the horizon. If the road were straight, there would be no obstacles to overcome and thus nothing to learn from. The unpredictable bends in the road are blessings in that they shape our ability to tackle the ones further along the journey.
