The Road Most Traveled

I am taking line dancing lessons. That style of where everyone stands in uniform lines and does exactly the same motions at exactly the same time in exactly the same directions. It’s great fun when at a Cajun restaurant and the women want to boogie while the men just want to eat crawfish. After returning from lessons that night and I’m curled up on the couch with a favorite author, the uniformity and absolute fun of the night was brought to light by a lesson the author was conveying.

She was portraying how in a world where we are so obsessed with everyone marching to the different drummer, embarking down the road less traveled, that maybe we have lost sight of where true happiness lies. That oftentimes true happiness lies on the road most traveled. The one right outside our front door, that we have looked at and trod upon every day of our lives.

While we spend our days reading news items on celebrities traveling across the globe to wear a beret and meditate at the top of the Eiffel tower while leaving their children and friends behind, we don’t stop to think of why they couldn’t meditate at the top of the CNB building and be home in time for lunch.

Do Frenchmen wake up each morning and fling open their windows exclaiming, "Ah, it is good to be in France this morning." More likely they wake up, brush their teeth, scarf down a croissant and head off to work on the assembly line at the Peugeot plant. Maybe take along their travel magazine featuring New York in September to dream about as they are lunching at the same bistro that they have eaten at for the past 30 years.

This made me feel immensely better that I was sitting on my well worn couch next to my snuggling daughter. That this moment in time while we were together watching a victim of a hungry bear getting his intestines shoved back inside by the doctors on Grey’s Anatomy was possibly where true happiness was found. That I had no need to carry out my plans of after the kids left home, to wear crude leather sandals and travel to the top of the Rocky Mountains to convince bands of man-eating rogue grizzly bears to convert to Christianity. That maybe my true calling was right on this couch, eating popcorn with my daughter while watching this poor guy on TV who must have run into a die-hard Pagan bear.

Or maybe true happiness isn’t found communing with the natives in a ceremonial luau on a tropical island. Maybe its found with the whole family gathered round over a fish dinner at Captain Ds while trying to figure out what freaky thing is wrong with that island on Lost. Maybe happiness is in the fact that my favorite fish place actually let me back inside even though I spilled my entire jumbo cup of tea the last time they allowed me in.

Could the author have meant that I found more peace in my back yard last Sunday while lying on the swing feeling our wonderfully cool spring breezes, hearing my two boys jujitzu-ing each other, my daughter shrieking with delight, and my husband clinking around the patio with his fishing poles than Richard Gere found at the top of a mountain in Tibet? With such a blue, blue sky and the clouds sailing across on such a sweet smelling spring day in Bossier City, who needs the road less traveled that leads to a monastery in Tibet? Who needs to convert a bunch of bears to the wonders of a human-free diet?

So, I turn on the radio and take the road most traveled. My daughter, my mother, and myself practiced our line dancing. All taking the same steps at the same time. Then I hear that heavy whoosh of exasperation.

"Mom," my daughter sighs. "You just don’t know how to do it."

As I watch her shimmy and shake in a vague rendition of the dance my teacher had taught me, I tilted my head. I looked at the radio and back at my daughter, and knew she wasn’t about to follow my steps.

So even though some feel the need to veer off the well trodden path, most can find joy right here on the same old road, doing the same old dance as everyone else.