I see my path but the destination's a mystery

Oh, the many places we've been in our lives!

Have you counted? The places where your life played out: your childhood home. The tree on which you and your sweetheart carved your initials. The college bar where you met your husband. The church in which you found God. The ocean alongside which you found love.

I confess: I'm guilty of going back to places I once lived. I'll sit in my car a while and relive those long ago times in living color. One of the best things I've done was visit Syracuse University last summer, a place and time I'd go back to in a heartbeat.

Even though it was where we met, my husband had to be convinced to go. He prefers to close chapters of his life and put the book on the shelf for good, so he wanted to remember his years there the way they were. To keep them frozen in time.

But me? When I looked at Bird Library I could see the hard stone steps on which the 18-year-old me sat on early one morning after a fight with him at a frat party. I could see two of his fraternity brothers walking up, each taking an arm and walking me to breakfast.

When I looked at my dorm I could see the many happy hours I spent listening to Led Zeppelin, stringing love beads and rolling joints. When I walked down a modernized Marshall St. I didn't see the Starbucks and parking lot; I saw hippies wearing tie dye, strumming guitars and smoking pot. I saw the best years of my life.

 Author Ann Patchett says this:

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. 

You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree. 

This place hasn't changed so terribly much, and so by an extension of logic 

I must not have changed much, either.

Oh, I don't know about that. But for me, it's always tremendously moving to revisit places where I was happiest.

The funny thing is that most places were happy, or at least ended up that way. I have no complaints, not really, about my colorful and interesting life. It can look random to others, but to me, well, looking back helps me see the connections.

The brilliant Steve Jobs said this:

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you to another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours – long hallways and unforeseen stairwells – eventually puts you in the place you are now. 

Every choice lays down a trail of bread crumbs, so that when you look behind you there appears to be a very clear path that points straight to the place where you now stand. But when you look ahead there isn't a bread crumb in sight – there are just a few shrubs, a bunch of trees, a handful of skittish woodland creatures. You glance from left to right and find no indication of which way you're supposed to go. 

And so you stand there, sniffing at the wind, looking for directional clues in the growth patterns of moss, and you think, 
What now?

That rings true. My path has never been clear and that's been the fun of it for me. I made it up along the way.  It's not for everyone, but it was definitely the right way for me. It turned out pretty well.

Sometimes not having any idea where we're going 

works out better than we could possibly have imagined.

Ann Patchett