Road Maps from Above

I had to borrow this photo because, at the time these thoughts were coming to me, I was driving and couldn’t snap one. And of course, this happens to be a lush, green road in England, not our dry, golden landscape in Amador, but it’s not about the greenery. It’s all about the road.

As we were driving home from Sacramento today, my navigation had me take a different route than usual. Looking down at my phone, I saw a straight road stretching out for three or so miles ahead of my little blue arrow. But looking out my windshield, Whoa! I saw an undulating roller coaster ride, still three miles long, and linear as the crow flies - not turning from side to side - but certainly not “straight “.

It got me thinking how, from afar, a person’s road might look really straight. Even, well... “even”. No insanely obvious jerks to the left or right; no health scare, car accident, or lost job. But if you were on their road, riding shotgun, and could see the peaks and valleys - one after the other in succession, and maybe feel the sinking pressure in your chest and head as the car tilted skyward, the dizzying weightlessness at the top of each crest, the flip-flop of your stomach as you slid down the other side, and finally the sinking weight of your body pressing heavily into your seat at the bottom of the hill, the next hill looming before you - you might see it differently. Of course you would see it differently! You would feel it. 

As a kid, we called these “Tickle-belly Hills”. We would chant for my dad to drive faster so we could feel them more intensely.  Each of my own kids feels Tickle-belly Hills differently. My girls say it hurts their heads and makes them feel dizzy. Jonah says he feels it in his thighs, and Natalie says it makes her headachy. My big boys used to laugh because they could feel it… well, let’s just say they could feel it down there, somewhere. Some of them hate it, some love it.  For me, it hits me in the chest and in the pit of my stomach.  It’s part thrill, part dread. 

Lately, I keep hearing people say how overwhelmed they are, saying they have “a lot going on“. And it seems more often than not, someone in the peanut gallery answers back “yah, we all do.”

Yah, we all do. 

Probably. But that certainly isn’t helpful. Because while we all have a lot on our plates right now, everyone’s plate is different. Everyone feels that road in a different way.  And it’s easy to look at someone else’s map from above and see it as a straight road, but that doesn’t mean it actually is.  It doesn’t work to compare, and we should try not to, but we do sometimes.  I do. We feel like no one knows how hard our road is right now. And hey, they probably don’t. Because you can’t compare caring for twins to being laid off, or being on quarantine to moving. And when someone says, “we all do”, they might be saying, “don’t forget me, I’m hurting too,” or even, “I can’t help you carry your load right now. Mine is already too heavy.”

Maybe we just need to answer the weary wave of that white flag that laments, “I have a lot going on”, with a call of “shotgun!”, and take their road with them for a while. 

Yeah, (I think) we all do.