The Right Path

I want to tell a little story.  I promise it will eventually make sense in the context of this blog.

In early March of this year, my oldest son and I took a road trip down to Arizona to watch some Spring Training baseball games.  We drove from our home in Utah down to the Phoenix area.  There are two route options when driving from Utah to Phoenix — down I-15 to Las Vegas and then east, or down Highway 89 past Lake Powell.  The I-15 route is quite a bit further, but because it is freeway the whole way, it takes about the same amount of time and is a little bit safer.  But I’ve driven every inch of I-15 (literally), and that part of it dozens of times, so I decided to take the other route.

What I didn’t know, and neither did Google Maps, is that two days before our trip, a huge sinkhole opened on Highway 89 just south of Page, Arizona, making the road unusable.  It was about 10:00 p.m. when Logan and I got to Page and saw the detour signs.  When you’re in the city, a detour means you drive a block or two out of your way to get around the obstacle, follow the many signs pointing the way, and then you’re back on the right path.  When you’re in the middle of nowhere, like Page AZ, detours are a little bit different.  There weren’t a bunch of signs pointing the way — there was one sign, saying “Go left.”  And it wasn’t “Go left for a block or two,” it was just “Go left and hope it turns out okay.”

The other thing about being in the middle of nowhere is that there’s no cell phone reception, which means there’s no Internet access, which means you can’t just pull up Google Maps on your phone to see where you’re going.  So all I could do was trust the sign and go left.

So I went left.  It was pitch black (no streetlights in the middle of nowhere, either).  There were no signs reassuring me that I was going the right way.  No cell phone access to see where I was or where I was going.  All I had was the little compass on my rear-view mirror, and it just made things worse, because it kept telling me I was going southeast, or east, or occasionally even northeast — when all I really wanted to do was go south.

Then I started getting worried that I had missed a sign somewhere.  Was I supposed to turn off miles ago?  Was I about to see a sign that said “Welcome to New Mexico”?

No joke, it was one of the worst feelings of my life.  I’m with my 6-year-old son, in the middle of nowhere, in the pitch black, and I have no idea if the miles I’m going are getting us closer to or further from where we want to be.  It was a helpless feeling, and I hated it.

Take a look at this screenshot from Google Maps.  The highlighted route is the way we ended up going (it’s the only option on Google Maps now, because Highway 89 is still closed).  The little tan line that looks like a much more direct route is the way I wanted to go.  We ended up driving 64.2 miles southeast/east/northeast on Highway 98, then 50.1 miles on Highway 160, just to get back to Highway 89.

Here’s the interesting thing, though.  The whole time I was on Highway 98, heading southeast/east/northeast, I felt miserable and hopeless, a palpable depression that I couldn’t shake.  The minute I turned onto Highway 160, I felt great.  Elation.  Joy.  Peace.  Even though at that point in time, I was technically further from where I wanted to be than I had been almost the entire time I was on Highway 98.

What was the difference?  Direction.  Once I saw the sign saying I could take Highway 160 back down to Highway 89, once my mirror started saying southwest instead of something with “east” in it, I knew I was heading the right direction.  And that fact alone made all the difference.

Take a look at another picture.  I posted this one on Facebook a couple weeks ago:

When I put this together on an airplane, I wasn’t thinking a ton about it.  I picked pictures that showed my body in all its non-glory.  It was totally a subconscious thing that I picked two “before” pictures where I looked about the same.  Sure, I was technically nine pounds lighter in the second one, but you can’t really tell the difference.  But you know what?  I can tell the difference, and it has nothing to do with the way I look.  I lived through both of those photographs, and I remember how I felt inside.  In the picture on the left, I was living with the nagging thought that I was slowly killing myself.  It wasn’t at the forefront.  I was happy — I was in front of the temple with the love of my life, so how could I not be happy?  But I wasn’t totally happy, because I didn’t know how many more years I’d have to spend with the love of my life.  I was twelve days away from starting this Health Journey™, but I didn’t know it — for all I knew, nothing was ever going to change.

In the other “before” picture, I was also happy, getting ready to share the most special day of my daughter’s life with her.  But in this picture, I knew — or at least had real hope — that I would be around for all of her other special days.  Someday she will graduate high school and college and get married and have kids and have grandkids, and I was starting to think that I’d get to see all that.

I was on the right path.  I had turned off of Highway 98 and onto Highway 160.  I still wasn’t back to Highway 89 yet — to the naked eye, you’d have no way of knowing if I was closer to it or further away.  But the compass on my mirror said I was heading there, and the joy and peace was perfect.

The funny thing is, in that collage, the two left pictures look like a set.  But when I look at it, the matching pair are the two on the right, because those are the two where I knew where I was going and was on my way to getting there.