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From Living It Daily

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We all travel the paths we know best. At least, I know I do. It seems we like to take the same route to places we like to frequent, whether it be our path to visit someone or the way we take to our places of employment. There is likely more than one way to get to those destinations, but we are much more interested in getting there in the shortest amount of time. If we take that path frequently, we eventually lose sight of our surroundings and focus only on the destination. It becomes more like a path we travel with tunnel vision. We hardly pay attention to anything but the road ahead.

I’ve often told you that my mind tends to wander off on tangents at times. This was one of those times. I could just as easily include this as another time I was looking out my window like I wrote about several articles ago. I say that because it was exactly what I was doing when what I’m going to talk about took place.

Let me paint a word picture of what started my thinking about the “Old Dirt Road” that prompted this.

I was looking out my window and thinking about many things. I was considering my plans for the day ahead for both work and some personal situations. I can’t really explain why it caught my attention the way that it did. All I know is that it did.

I began thinking about what I was seeing. Outside my window is a tree. Not the one I wrote about before, but a different one. I believe the name of this type of tree is “Carrotwood.” It is an evergreen tree. For those not familiar, it doesn’t lose its leaves and stays green year-round. Sometimes the simplest things can trigger a creative moment. On this particular morning, the sky appeared a deeper color of blue than I often remembered seeing. I think since I do a lot of writing, including poetry and songs, my mind was triggered by what I was seeing. It was also bringing up memories from my past, so I began writing down what would later become one of my songs. Mostly, I just had the first couple of lines, but they were enough to keep me thinking about the moment for an extended period of time. I want to share a little of what I wrote called “The Old Dirt Road”:

Blue skies, above evergreen trees.

An old dirt road, I don’t know where it leads.

I don’t know that I ever traveled this way before,

But I know that it leads to more.

Immediately, in my mind’s eyes, I was no longer looking out my window, but I was seeing an old dirt road from my past as a kid living in Southern Illinois.

It was not unusual for us as a family to go for drives on a Sunday afternoon. All the other days, my mom and dad were busy or working and my sister and I were likely in school. We had several small parks and large lakes within close driving distance, which left a lot for us to explore on those drives. On this day I’m thinking about, my dad pulled off the main road onto a gravel-covered dirt road. I remember looking at my sister in the back seat beside me, and then we both asked in unison, “Where are we going?” I remember my dad answering, “We’re going to see where this old dirt road leads.”

My memory of that day came back to me so vividly as I gazed out my window. I knew we hadn’t ever traveled on that old dirt road before. It was a brand-new experience, at least for my sister and me. We saw things we didn’t know existed. We were both young and could only travel close to our home on our bikes. Those Sunday drives expanded our knowledge of the area where we lived. I remember a few things about that drive, and though we didn’t know it at the time, the road my dad had taken circled around one of the several lakes in our area.

One of the first things I remember seeing was the spillway of the dam at one end of the lake. I had never seen anything like it before: the water pouring over that edge, the sound of it, the sheer size of the thing to a kid who’d only ever seen the calm, flat water of the lake itself. I remember just standing there, taking it in, not saying much of anything. To this day, I cannot tell you exactly how we got there; I just know we did, and I know it felt like we’d stumbled onto something the rest of the world didn’t know about.

Eventually, the ‘old dirt road’ led us to a place we all had seen before. It was the area at the entrance of the lake where there were boat rentals, a swimming area, as well as the camping area we had camped at before.

Had we not taken that ‘Old Dirt Road’ on that day, I would probably have never known there was a vast world around the lake that I had never seen and likely never would have.

You see, the reason I likely would have never seen that “world” is that we moved from Southern Illinois to Southwest Florida when I was eleven years old, which was about a year later. I’ve lived here for a long time, married my wife, and raised two daughters, and have five grandchildren. Even with all of that, there are many places I have never been around where I live. Some I have discovered because of where my service business has taken me, but there is so much more to see. And it’s not just the roads I mean. Some of my ‘old dirt roads’ these days aren’t made of gravel at all — they’re the conversations I’ve been putting off, the ideas I keep circling back to but haven’t followed through on, the places in my own heart I haven’t fully explored. Those call to me just as much as any road ever did. That leads me to the next part of the poem/song I’d like to share. It goes like this:

So many unknowns that are callin’ to me.

Because down that road there’s so much more to see.

And perhaps those ole skies won’t always be blue

But the old dirt road is calling me to follow it through.

I learned through that experience that following the same route day after day isn’t always the best thing. Fortunately, though much of my service area I frequent often, there is more than one way to get to those locations. Sometimes I take the long route, sometimes the shorter route, but it seems there is quite often something new to see. I don’t always have to get there in the shortest amount of time, although sometimes the shortest route is necessary. In the last thirty-six years of working my service business, there have been a lot of changes. Some of those changes I would have never seen if I had always followed the same route. Sometimes, I have discovered things simply because a service call has taken me down an ‘old dirt road’ I have never traveled before.

How about you? Do you always take the same, shortest route to wherever you travel to or want to go, or even have to go? May I make a suggestion? Take the longer route sometime. Take that ‘old dirt road’ you’ve been avoiding but has captured your attention. Maybe it’s a phone call you’ve been putting off. Maybe it’s a memory you haven’t let yourself sit with in a long while. Maybe it’s simply slowing down enough to notice the world outside your own window. See what might be down that other path. You may be surprised at what you discover and what you may have been missing all these years. Can you hear that ‘Old Dirt Road’ calling you to follow it through?

Hey, this is Russ, and I’m still Living It Daily… See ya next time…