Destination Driven

Sometimes it’s nice to take the scenic route to get to where we’re going. It’s a way of acknowledging that there’s just as much value in the journey, as there is in the destination. 

Life, metaphorically speaking, is all about the scenic route. There is no destination per se, and as cliche as it sounds, the journey is indeed the destination.

When I first met my husband, I was incredibly destination driven in every facet of my life: career, marriage, even grocery shopping. And if I’m honest with myself, I can still find myself reaching for a destination mindset from time to time.

It was late summer, or maybe it was mid winter. It’s always hard to tell when you’re on the coast, and we were on one of our first big road trips together, headed back to our first shared home after a family reunion.

As we left the reunion and headed down the driveway of my parents home, there was a fork in the road. To the right, a predictable path towards our apartment, a full state away. To the left, an unknown path, still towards our apartment that full state away.

At this point in our relationship, infatuation still reigned supreme so I stifled my reservations about the unknown when he asked about taking the other route. In fact, I turned to my beloved, stars in my eyes, and said, “Sure. Sounds like fun.” After all, it didn’t look like that many more miles on the map. And it was more direct-ish. Really, it should’ve taken about the same amount of time, if not less… right?

The planner inside me was beating her head against a wall, wondering who this strange woman was who’d agreed to such an uncertain path when there was a perfectly good, reliable route in the exact opposite direction. But I held that voice back and we turned left, instead of right. In the beginning the ride was joyful, full of thoughtful conversations about life and process versus product, and embracing uncertainty… in taking the scenic route.

Hour after hour passed and slowly, ever so subtly, we passed that magical threshold of time when the two routes should have taken the same number of hours. The car grew quiet, and the little voice in my head was smirking arrogantly. See. Told you it was a bad idea.

After the six hour car ride became a more-than-ten-hour car ride, I lost it. The infatuation. The doe eyed love. It all fell away as day became night, and we still weren’t back in our nice warm bed. I used all the barbs and thorns my inner critic had thrown at me and lost complete and utter sight of the journey all together. I had it up to here with the journey and wanted the destination four hours ago!

Eventually, finally, in ice cold silence, we painfully arrived in our driveway. The ignition turned off, we nearly fell out of the car, exhausted of each other, and the journey.

I’d like to say that we laughed about it that night. That we could embrace the irony of trying, on some level, to force a journey out of a trip that just needed to be a destination towards bed and work the next day. But it took several weeks before we were able to laugh (quite hysterically) at the deep and thoughtful conversations we had in the car that day about the scenic routes in life. To this day, we share this story as one of our favorites.

The journey is the destination in life, and whether you get derailed or choose a detour that takes longer than you like, we all have a choice: to focus on where we are or where we’re going.

My advice? Take the scenic route as often as possible, but make sure to pack plenty of snacks.