Reflections from the road.

I'm road tripping at the moment - en route from the far north to as far south as I can go without jumping the straight to Tasmania. And as always, travel is one of my biggest teachers.

Here are a few reflections from the road; things I've been musing on while driving for hours and hours and more hours.

For me, travel is a wonderful way to make time slow down. And since I've been complaining for months that this is the fastest year I've ever lived, time dilation is a welcome experience. It has to do with novelty - my mind can't gloss over the details it sees every day, can't zone out through routine routes, because everything is new. And yeah I've driven this way before, more than once, but it was a long time ago, and it's different now. I'm different now.

Different selves is something else I'm thinking about. How who we are, moment to moment, influences how we experience life and the opportunities that arise. I had an experience a few days back where I was driving through a little town and pulled over by an antique store that had a giant rocking horse out the front. Inside I made friends with a cat that the shop owner said showed up a few weeks back and decided she lived there now. It was a nice cat.

And then, the part of me who had somewhere to be showed up - time to get back on the road, keep driving. Perversely, I ignored every direction the GPS gave me because I was more or less heading in the right direction and felt like taking the road less travelled, not the fastest route (why does the GPS always assume speed is the most important factor when choosing a route? Why isn't there a 'scenic route' option?).

I ended up in Lismore and realised I did not actually want to be in Lismore, so I apologised to the GPS and let it direct me from there. Turns out I had not been going in more or less the right direction, I had been going in exactly the wrong direction, and so it directed me right back to the town with the cat.

I wondered why my hunch had led me in the wrong direction to somewhere I didn't want to be. And in the end, I figured it was so I'd end up back where I started, but experience myself as different to who I was when I'd left. This time, I'd given up on urgency and the need to get somewhere. And so there was space for serendipity.

I found a second hand bookshop that also sold coffee and cake, and bought a slice of Persian love cake because it reminded me of a friend. At the back of the shop I found a letter writing station, which felt like joy because I have been writing letters to people while sitting in cafes eating meals along the way. This letter writing station had a rack of envelopes addressed to different kinds of people (to a backpacker, to a struggling mum), and you were welcome to take one if it was written to you.

I took the one that was there for me, and sat a while and wrote one addressed to someone who dreams. I hope it's exactly what they need to hear.

I got back in the car and drove through the rain thinking about how when I was acting from a kind of agitated need to be somewhere else, I ended up somewhere I didn't want to be… but when I was acting from curious presence, I got to be part of something connected and full of the kind of whimsy that makes me happy.

So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find even a small pocket of novelty in your world, and explore it - even for five minutes - with curious presence, and see what you find. Does time feel different? Do you feel different? Who do you get to be, when you're approaching life in that way?