Where Do We Go From Here?

Summary: I took some time off this past week for reading, writing, thinking, and sleeping, each of which was very much needed. I went to a decent-sized town, a college town, that I had passed through while traveling on the train a few times, but had never had time to explore. I looked forward to the idea of getting out and doing a bit of wandering. So, fighting 30 mile per hour winds, I drove three hours across the Midwest plains to a place called Normal, checked into my hotel, and began to settle in. The room was nice even if the view out the window was that of the hotel roof. I took a nice nap and when I woke up, I decided that I should probably start the process of deciding where to eat. I have a rule when traveling that I don’t eat at chains or fast-food restaurants. Part of the joys of being someplace new is trying out the local cuisine, preferably mom-and-pop type places where the flavor of the food reflects the flavor of the people who live there. I typically rely on Yelp or some other review-based system to help me find which places are most popular and then match the reviews with my interests and dietary limitations. Looking at the reviews, there were a number of restaurants that looked interesting and when I glanced over at the adjacent map, it looked as though several of them were relatively close to the hotel, which I always appreciate. I chose one, a barbecue place with rave reviews, put the address into my phone, and leave. I didn’t really bother looking at how far it was, or the fact that the GPS said it was going to take 15 minutes to get there. Obviously, the trip was longer than I anticipated, augmented by the fact that the number of one-way streets down purely residential neighborhoods had me convinced that I had to have either missed the restaurant or was going in the wrong direction. I doubled back on an adjacent street, tried again, and only became more confused the longer I drove. When I finally gave in and listened to the directions being given to me, I made it to the restaurant in a matter of minutes and went on to enjoy a thoroughly delicious meal. This type of thing happens to me far more often than I like to admit. I’m not good at following directions. I want to follow my instinct, instead, and my instinct does not have a good track record. In fact, my instinct is so bad that Kat frequently tells people that if there is a difficult way to do something, I’ll find it. She’s not wrong. There are long-standing jokes, to the point of stereotyping, about men not stopping to ask for directions. Those jokes are older than the invention of the automobile. Foldable maps or digital GPS are both things intended to make the process of finding a place easier, but when we ignore the directions given, we often find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time with nothing to eat. We do the same thing in other areas of our lives as well. We always have. So much so, that we’ve built points of religious commemoration around some of them. Humanity, both corporately and individually, frequently finds itself at decision points where we’ve accomplished something of great significance but then have no idea what to do afterward. How do we find ways to build off the emotional high and keep moving forward? What do we do if what brought us to this point is incapable of taking us forward? How do we respond when what worked last week doesn’t work today? Finding those answers is often not as easy as listening to the directions on an app. If only life worked that way. Is There A Ralph’s Around Here? Both our Jewish friends and our Christian friends had significant holidays this past week. For Jews,

Where Do We Go From Here?

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