The Road

They say the open road will carry you home for free.

Another year has come and gone, and with it parts of us we might never have noticed had it not been for that silent reflection that comes from the open road. What people fail to realise is that the world is only as small as we permit. There will always be a path to follow, a door to open, a far distant land to chase, and so many in number do they lay beyond our sight that we accept that blindness of comfort as our only reality.

Perhaps it is a confession of our character in what we see of the world around us. Too often are we content with passing the exhaustions of life with naming rest simply as lack of motion. I would rather say that there lies within us all a tiredness of the bones which no amount of sleep can tame. No number to the hours passed idly waiting for whatever might come upon us next. For that is not rest, and neither does it bring us peace.

To be perfectly composed is to be wholly deposed of that sense of wonder which has driven our kind into the farthest reaches of the earth and so much that extends beyond it. Of late, it has become a theme to chase those wilds into wherever they may lead. Whether to the mountain tops or the thundering seas, adventure lies within us as much as it lies around, and to deny either is to cut away a piece of our soul which we so dearly need.

For those who seek it, the answer is simple. Search, and you will find. It may not be what you intended to become, nor where you expected that passage to end, but it will always be where you needed.

There is something to be said for staring at far away things. Things so close yet impossibly far away as though separated by the vastness of the ocean. When it is the ocean itself that rises out of a turn of the earth, our sense of wonder is bared to the true power of the natural world. An understanding and a realisation comes from the strength of something which has outlived us by as many generations as it has years, and for each of us it is different. That is the beauty of the world around us. It does not care who you are. It does not care where you came from or where you are going. It does not care who you were or who you have become. And to us all, it presents the simplest and most profound gift of all. Opportunity.

There lies an anchor upon the heart; we long for a world we cannot see, heedless of the consequences which might truly bring us there. It is that dichotomy- a hope to better the future, unable to forsake the familiarity of the past- which keeps us from the way of progress.

Yet that is the grandest illusion which we suffer. The only limitations we have for our vision of the future are those which we impose upon it. There is no power in making a new resolve a year after the last one. There is nothing to be gained by waiting for the perfect circumstance or the passing of some old obstacle which has loomed between us and our ambition. In truth, the road which takes us through this journey moves forward by only our own intention, and there is a spectacular world waiting for us there.

The problem is, you think you have time.