on why i do road trips

Life for sure is never boring. Change happens. It never fails, though its subjects sometimes do.

Life makes us just as tough or soft, enough to make us survive. Make us too hard and we fail. Make us too soft and we crumble. The bad news is that the formula always works only for one - no two people go through the same experiences and come out ever the same. What worked for one will probably fail for another.

The good news is that life is always about choices. Every road has a turn, sometimes a junction, sometimes a dead-end. I used to think the end game is the point of it all, so you make the choice at the very beginning where to be at in the future. However, if you set your sights too much at the destination, you miss out on the small twists and turns. You'll miss the journey. You might arrive at your intended destination and wonder how and why you got there in the first place. Or worse, you find the place to be empty and you start wishing you where some place else.

Someone once asked me, what if you reach a fork in the road and realize you just wasted your time? To which I said, it's my time to waste. The truth is, I've started to love the journey, I've fallen in love with the road and its twists and turns. So what if the end is a dead end? So what if we diverge at the end?

Yes, the destination is important. But just as important is my decision to take on the journey. It's my choice to make. If only for the experience this journey will bless me, I won't come home empty handed. At the end of it all, I know it was my choice that led me to where I finally find myself at. I will remember the turns I took. I will commit to memory the peculiarities of the road - the ditches and the potholes and the rain that fell in between stops and washed away the dust in the air.

At the end of the journey, I will always remember the one who sat beside me in the passenger seat, the one who helped me navigate the tricky terrain. The one whose smile kept me up, whose hands I held most of the time. The one who reminded me to go slower to enjoy the view, the one who asked to open the windows to feel the cold air.

The one who made the journey worth many times more than any destination. And if it's the same person I can come home to in the end...not bad at all.