The Road to Lost Things

There is a section of the book 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez where a character finds a pair of lost glasses after searching for days. There is a line I’ll never forget and have since used as a perpetual warning to myself. Márquez writes, “the road to lost things is hindered by routine habit”. In other words, change is how we find whatever it is we’re seeking.

I’ll share a personal story that I have embraced as a true defining moment for me in this regard.

This story isn’t just about decision making.   Nor is it merely about opportunities in life.  If it was, I would feel obligated to address the deeply entangled religious and socio-economic implications of the word itself. That would be voluminous and unnecessary given the point I would like to make.  That is, at certain times in our lives we have to choose to alter our course, or not. Hesitation, or worse, indecision is often rooted in the very real fear of uncertainty.  How we respond at these inflection points is a function of how well we listen to our intuition.

I remember the very moment I gained clarity about this all.  It was a really nice Spring at The Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, CT.   I was a senior and a Co-Captain of the baseball team.  School was out and I was at practice.  I was standing in the outfield during situation drills, thinking about how excited I was to be going off to play college football. 

Photo: @LCBaseballPells

My parents never let me play football growing up but relented when I wouldn’t stop begging the Summer before Freshman year.  I put so much work into becoming a better football player that I had all but abandoned the sport I fell in love with at the age 4.  Baseball was always my sport.  Until, it wasn’t and it was just routine. I had to finally admit that. If I had not, continuing to play would have been a source of regret and unhappiness for me. The reasons for this are too many to concisely explain and again, not necessarily germane to the point. Let’s just say I was looking for something that I wasn’t finding on the field.

The road split and I was shocked at the weight of the decision that was upon me.  More so because I knew I had to take a new path.  I also knew I had to break the news to Coach but it wasn’t going to be right after practice. 

Our team was led by one of the greatest human beings you’ll ever meet, Coach Duane Estes.  He was also Reverend Duane Estes which explains what happened next.  When we wrapped up our conversation in his office shortly after that day, I couldn’t tell if he was upset, disappointed or happy for me.  He was not allowing any emotion to cloud what he knew had to be my decision and mine alone.  Then, before I left, he handed me a tiny laminated card.  The card read:

 God grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference

It was the short version of the Serenity Prayer. I went to Catholic school as a kid. This prayer wasn’t new to me.  But in that precise moment, it changed everything.  I knew I had just exhibited for the first time, the courage to change the things I can.  It wasn’t easy.  My teammates were real friends and we were always together during the season from Spring training in Florida to our long road trips on school nights.  Change is not a mere moment in time.  It ripples throughout and its duration is highly correlated to the scale of the decision.

Yet and still, we all move on.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

- Robert Frost

I was empowered.  Not simply because of what I did but rather, because I chose to do it.  The ownership of that shifted my confidence into overdrive forever.  To this day, I owe a tremendous amount of my success to this revelation. There have been so many instances throughout my life that mimic this narrative.  There was the time I resigned from a great job and moved to Puerto Rico.  Everyone around me thought I had gone mad. There was also that time I went to Boulder Outdoor Survival School in Utah by myself.  My friends still joke about me jumping out of an airplane with just a spoon (of course that not how it really went down).

My life, like every other, has been full of forks in the road.  While we never know what’s at the end of the road, experience has taught me to take the one less traveled.   

Since 1968, the Boulder Outdoor Survival School–known to most simply as BOSS–has delivered life-changing, wilderness-based experiences to adventurous people from around the World.

This story is simple because it’s uniquely mine but I believe it applies to anyone.  This story is about intuition and siding with instinctive reasoning versus conscious decision making when it matters most.  Call it “a feeling” or an “inner voice” or whatever moniker you wish.  Either way, each is a result of a collection of non-conscious operations over time.  It’s our brain’s auto-pilot.  Our stories have to be about having the courage to trust what we already know, even if it means making an unpopular decision. 

Don’t be hindered by routine habit.