Chadwick’s Scenic Route Epiphany

Over this past weekend my girlfriend and I took a little time out from everyday life to go visit our friends in Missoula.  Not a huge vacation as we were only there for about 24 hours, but it was one of the best trips I have ever had the pleasure of taking.

As a person grows out of childhood and moves into their lives as a functioning part of society, our view tends to narrow into the future and what is readily available to us.  Making decisions everyday that will shape

the future into

what we want it to be.  What college to go to, what do we find interesting to study and will also lead into some kind of job and hopefully a career.  Also, smaller decisions to determine how our time will be filled in the immediate future.  When we are living our lives in our everyday world, we make decisions based around the small number of things that we are familiar with.  It leads to feeling like our options are very limited.  We blame it on the city we live in or the weather, our friends, or any number of things that are beyond our control.

Over the past few months I have had the epiphany that we are not bound by options that are put in our lives, but that we are bound by our own decision to put only a few immediately accessible and familiar options in front of us.

This past weekend on the way back from Missoula we took the long route back

by turning off of the highway onto a small little road that took us through Phillipsburg and Anaconda.  Such a small detour seemed like a good idea as we were in no hurry to go anywhere and this little turn off would be nice filler of time.  It turned out that it was a better adventure than we could have ever imagined.  And the best part was that nothing happened.  We didn’t have a brush with death or discover something that no one else had ever seen, but neither of us had ever seen anything down this road.  We knew as soon as we turned off the road that was familiar to us, we were on an adventure.  The feeling of freedom leaked into our personalities and we made decisions that we never would have without that freedom holding us up.  We felt like anything was possible.  And it lasted.  It made me realize that anything that is out of my ordinary small little world makes my eyes wide and open to everything and this new perspective made even my ordinary world, new.

Taking the scenic route was scenic, in the definition sense that it was a beautiful drive, but also in the sense that I now see opportunity for fun and adventure in all sorts of little things that I would have missed otherwise.