Twenty years ago this month, I went on a month-long cross-country roadtrip with my then-girlfriend. Somewhere in New Mexico, we set our sights on Four Corners, the national monument where New Mexico meets up with Arizona, Colorado, and Utah in a neat little point. We heard it was a good place to find turquoise jewelry.
Off we went on the tiny squiggle of a line leading from our campsite du jour to this dot on our map (we were serious about taking the smallest roads possible at any given time) and, hey presto desert driving, the car started overheating. This led to a chance encounter with a truck driver who filled the car’s radiator and rigged its fan to blow continuously on the engine until we could limp our way to a repair shop; the truck driver told us Four Corners was a tourist trap with overpriced jewelry.
After a stop in the next town of any size for what turned out to be just a new radiator cap (yay for easy and inexpensive fixes!) we continued on the route the truck driver suggested and picked up a stray dog instead of jewelry. We named her Ari and, three days later, gave her to a VW bus full of college guys in Las Vegas when it became heartbreakingly clear that she was terrified of the car. They, in turn, gave her to a friend with a fenced-in yard who renamed her Happy Jacks and spoiled her rotten.
It was my favorite part of that whole trip, that bizarre turn of events all spurred by a busted radiator cap. We never could have planned it but we sure could have resisted it; we could have dialed back in toward Four Corners the minute that truck driver had disappeared from our rear view.
Goals are like that, too. We set them because they help us discern which of the countless actions to take in any given day. We don’t get to decide where, exactly, those roads will take us, though. Sure, we can stubbornly fixate on a goal and, when that goal truly is a useful route to our Biggest and Baddest Life, that stubbornness can serve us well.
It sometimes happens, though, that a goal gets us a ways down the road and to the point of discovering a crossroads, an intersection where a turn in a new direction might just be an even more powerful way to create that Biggest, Baddest Life. In those cases, rigid commitment to the original goal can become a clever way to hold ourselves back.
The key is being honest with ourselves – not goal hopping when things get dicey or scary or challenging, and not sticking when rerouting pokes our ego or makes previous efforts feel pointless. Instead, the questions to ask ourselves are: What’s my Biggest, Baddest Life look like? And which of the paths I currently see looks, smells, tastes like the better one to get me to that life?
That trip was about going from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific in the month we had available. And that’s exactly what we did though the way we accomplished it was far different than what we could have anticipated when we set out on June 13, 1998.