Today we went for a drive to our favourite Sunday-morning-breakfast Café. On the way home Pete wanted to call into a Plant Nursery he had seen advertised online, so he asked me to program the address into our GPS.
I was thinking, as we drove along, how much easier it is with the GPS to guide us. I remember back in the days when we would have directions all written out on a notepad, and I would be struggling to read the road map as we went along.
‘You need to take the third right,’ I would say, and Pete would frown at me and ask
‘Are you sure?’ So I’d check again and, sure enough, I had the stupid map upside down. LOL. I’m not very good with directions you see.
But the GPS has no such limitations -most of the time it will direct you unerringly to your required destination. Oh, there have been times when it has taken us on a wild goose chase – but that’s another story.
If, for whatever reason, you manage to make a wrong turn, the GPS will announce
‘Recalculating…!’
Usually it will then take you around the block to get back to the right heading, but, if this is not an option, it will tell you to
“Turn around when possible.’
Now wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought, if we could have a GPS to direct the journey of our lives? We would start by programming in our required destination – the goals we wish to achieve in our allotted time. The Life GPS would then ask us if we wanted to travel by the most direct route, or would we prefer to take the scenic way? And if, for whatever reason, we went off course, it would announce…
‘Recalculating…!’
If it couldn’t easily get us back on course, it would tell us to ‘turn around when possible’.
Now Pete often ignores the GPS directions. Unlike me, he has a great sense of direction and he usually knows pretty well how to get where he is going – the GPS is just there for back up really. But life doesn’t remain static like the countryside. There are all sorts of twists and turns which can affect our daily journey, and what worked yesterday won’t necessarily work again tomorrow. So the Life GPS would need to come with an added warning..
“Please be advised, by ignoring these directions you run the risk of becoming hopelessly far away from your proposed destination. So please – turn around when possible!’
©Lyn Murphy 2012
3 comments:
Hi Lyn,
Like Pete, I ignore the GPS. If you've ever driven with me you would know that that makes no sense, since I am directionally-challenged. So much so that I work "getting lost time" into my schedule when going someplace new.
Your observation that life doesn't remain static is so true. We would all probably be better off operating on the assumption that what worked yesterday will not work tomorrow. At least this would prompt us to think about things instead of relying on our memories.
Ray
OMGosh..the title of this post made me laugh! That is the first thing I thought of...I am definitely recalculating...going to start saying that when someone says something that doesn't appeal to me!
Lyn, I so relate to this post! I love my 'Tom tom'; I find having 'her' navigating for me is so reassuring! We originally bought her in the US when we did a driving holiday there last year. My husband was unsure about buying one but he ended up being pretty impressed with how it helped us.
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