LIFE IS LIKE A TWO-WAY STREET

While driving along and feeling all the bumps in the road, I realized it’s just like life. If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s the realization that life is like a two-way street with bumps in the road.

It seems whenever a road is newly paved, soon after it is being dug up to fix something underneath the asphalt or tar pavement. That can be equated to relationships. In a relationship, there are often bumps along the way and breakups before fixing something that inevitably went wrong. Just like the pavement is sometimes repaired, relationships sometimes get repaired.

While traveling by train from Anchorage, Alaska, to Denali, we were asked to share meal tables since the train had limited seating in the dining hall. When seated with two women who were close in age to us, we were entertained with their life stories. Friends from work for over 40 years, the two women often travel together. Both were from California. One was a recent widow and retired tax attorney. The other, an accountant, left her husband at home with their three dogs and an elderly parent.

After lunch, the two women said they enjoyed our company so much that they wanted to sit with us at dinner. They decided to change the seating arrangement so we could speak with the other party. While conversing at dinner, the accountant, sitting across from me, unloaded all her “dirty laundry.” As if trying to understand the reasons for the bumps in the road, she told me about her on-and-off dating years with her husband and becoming pregnant before marriage. The funniest line was, “I can tell you anything; I’ll never see you again.”

Traveling down life’s highway is like cautiously staying on the right side of the road. Avoiding the bumps takes a great deal of maneuvering. It seems that our “friend” on the train worked it out with her husband. That was nice to know, even though we’ll never see her again…