Recalculating....

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

The Bug on the Windscreen

 ©Lyn Murphy 2011

There was a bug on the windscreen of the car.

We had stopped, during our Sunday drive in the countryside, to have a look at a quaint little knick-knack shop. As we pulled back into the traffic on the Highway, we spotted the bug on the driver’s side of the windscreen.

Don’t ask me what kind of bug he was. He was orange and black, with an angular body and long, stick-thin legs. Right then, those stick-thin legs quivered with the effort of hanging on to the windscreen as the momentum of the car increased the flow of air around him.

We expected he would soon lose his grip and fly off – back to his home patch. But, instead, he hung on for grim death and he stayed hanging on for at least another ten kilometres or so, until he suddenly disappeared during the brief moment when our attention was diverted elsewhere.

 Now ten kilometres for us, when travelled in a car, is hardly any distance at all. But, to a little orange and black bug with stick-thin legs – it could well be like being transported to another planet. I guess it didn’t occur to him that every minute spent clinging to that slippery glass windscreen was taking him further and further away from everything familiar to him. From his family (do bugs live in family groups?) and from his major food source (whatever that might be).

All he had to do was let go. Yet he stayed there, clinging on with every ounce of his strength, until he simply couldn’t hold on any longer.

I doubt that bugs have the ability to reason. Whatever his reason for continuing to enduring the G-forces of travelling on the windscreen of our car – I’m sure it was all to do with an instinctual fear of the unknown.

It’s the same kind of fear that keeps us clinging on to things that are really of no benefit to us either. And we do, don’t we? We cling on to hurts and grievances from the past, to wrong attitudes and unfounded, unrealistic fears and anxieties. We hang on with the same grim determination of the bug on the windscreen – even though every second that we continue on this journey is often taking us further and further down the road to our own destruction.

We hang on because we don’t know how to let go, or what will happen when we do. We most certainly have the ability to reason that this kind of behaviour is not good for us, and yet our fear often outweighs our common-sense.

Now I could have told that bug ‘If you let go now, before the car picks up speed, you will be able to flap your wings and escape the drag of the car.’ See I was able to see things from a much different perspective than the little bug. And sometimes we need to seek out people who can help us too – people who can see the bigger picture and advise us accordingly.

© Lyn Murphy 2011