The Road Less Travelled

Linking with #SkyWatch

I'm not really fit to talk about this topic. I may have taken a little longer to get there, but I did eventually get married and have kids. I worked a run of the mill corporate job for 15 years or so. I became a stay-at-home mum after my second child was born. All my roads have been pretty conservative norms by society's standards. 

However, I have noticed that a number of my friends have switched from high powered,high income jobs to lower paid, not for profit work in their 50s. So perhaps the road travelled by most of us, or the pathways of 'success' are not as fulfilling as we're lead to believe? These people are deciding they need 'more', but it isn't more money that they're chasing.

I struggled to write this post. I don't feel I choose the road less travelled very often. So I put it to friends. They came back with stories of adventures in remote places, like meeting an old lady on the TransSiberian Railway, a smuggler who was fascinated by them, the tourists, because they seemed exotic. One woman reminisced about the time she hitchhiked across the Nullabour with her dog. Another told a tale of getting lost trekking to Base Camp on Everest and spending the night in a shepherd's corral with his goats. the tales where curiosity is rewarded or when getting lost brings a gift of unforgettable experience. There were many tales of adventurous youth, choosing to go off the well trodden path, both in the travels or working on cruise ships for years.

Then came the stories of missed flights, getting on the wrong plane to arrive in an entirely different destination than intended and one friend changed her flight because she didn't want to have to get up and go to JFK so early. Her original trip was on flight 173 on December 28, 1978 which crashed when it ran out of fuel while trying to fix an issue with the landing gear. These decisions that change everything, or throw you into unanticipated experience.

Which got me thinking. Sometimes the road less travelled is accidental. Our lives are a million different choices, often imperceptible, made daily. Any of those decisions, no matter how small, might steer us onto a road less travelled for awhile. You may remember when booking a trip to Norway, I didn't really pay attention to the map and booked us to Svalbard, the northern most settlement on the planet, for a family holiday in the Polar Night. I realised when we were the only tourists on the plane, the only people with children in a sea of FIFO workers and even the airport staff were asking us what we were doing there that perhaps this wasn't the most thought out plan of mine. This lead to our encounter with a polar bear and a wild near death experience, saved by an amazingly quick thinking and brave dog sled guide!

A friend who lived her whole life travelling the planet, since she was 5 and then from 17 working in many countries and in the travel industry, was forced to give up her own travel agency when COVID hit. She got a job at the ATO and to my surprise, she loves it. So which is her road less travelled? The nomadic life she lead in the first 45 years of her life, or the 9-5 government gig she's revelling in now?  Maybe there are many roads and it's only our world view that makes them see more alluring and remote?

Maybe we don't always choose the road less travelled but when we look back, we find out we ended up on it anyway, and that willingness to take a chance or having the curiosity to explore, to throw ourselves in wholeheartedly and back our decisions, as the Robert Frost poem ends "has made all the difference".

Linking with #WaterThursday for the first and last shots