I kind of feel like I'm at a crossroads in my life. Not sure where I'm going. This happens from time to time. I mean, I can look back and see where I've come from, and by looking back, I might get a clue where I'm going, but today, from where I stand, I'm looking at two roads (maybe more) and well, I'm at a loss on which road to take, which way to turn. Usually, I'm thinking we come up to these decisions all the time, and we just take a left or a right without really thinking, like of course this is the only way to go. You can spend a lot of your time just going, without thinking. It might be the best way.
Then again, sometimes, you're dumbfounded. You find yourself at an intersection, and you wonder how you got there, and well, you haven't any good idea of where you're going. That's how I'm feeling today. I'm thinking of Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads so he could play guitar and sing the blues like no other man alive. Maybe not such a bad deal. I think of Little Bobby Zimmerman taking the road out of Hibbing, Minnesota and making his way to Greenwich Village. Or Jasper Johns waking up from a dream and painting a big American flag. These were choices, in the moment, that then set a tone for a life. I'm sure I've made of million of them myself. And how did I get here, how did I become the person that I have become?
I think of Robert Frost and the "road not taken." So, that's the thing, each decision means that another one is not acted upon, I take a left here, I can never take that right again. And who could I have been, and what could I have done? Then again, maybe we all have only one destiny. I mean, the road we take is the road we take, and there really was never a chance that we'd take the other. Can it be so? I know there's a physical highway, a genetic freeway; once you're born you can't get off the merry go round, your body will do this and not that, you will have blue eyes and not green, etc.
I mean I'm not gonna sprout wings, but yes, I can fly. I can imagine another me. I can imagine another life. I can put myself there, I can make my choice at the crossroads. That is a cross we have to bear, and I guess if we are crucified by the choices we make, at least let them be our choices, not those handed to us by someone else. So, I'm standing at the crossroads waiting for a sign, or a man, or a demon, or a bird, or well, something that will give me a clue, an inkling on which way to turn. I wait. As Tom Petty reminds us: "the waiting is the hardest part."
