Wednesday ramble: mixing metaphors

Would you allow me another solipsistic ramble about life lessons from outdoor adventures? It involves shrubbery (in the "Spamalot" sense):

...our heroes are stuck in a dark and very expensive forest, and their enemies--the very annoying 'knights who say nee'--demand, of all things, a shrubbery. Knowing they're in no place to acquire a shrubbery, they break into "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," only--in the middle of the song (well, toward the end)--to come across a woman coming through with... a shrubbery that she was getting rid of.

The moral, for our purposes, being that you can't worry about where your shrubbery might come from. You can't focus on the high unlikelihood of shrubbery, or at least you can't let that stop you from making your way through the forest. It's like that quote--of unknown origin, though often mistakenly attributed to Goethe--

"...the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

You can find, in my original 'shrubbery' post, a couple of instances in my life where this has worked for me: there was no answer or path in sight, but I kept moving and one opened up, from out of nowhere. I was alone in Budapest and needed a friend, and I found one. I stumbled upon a vegan in Budapest, who wanted to chat. That, my friends, is a shrubbery.

You're only eligible for a shrubbery if you're in the right place, and there are two parts to that: you have to be in the forest in the first place--you venture out even though there's no shrubbery in sight--and you have to eventually figure out the right path, which means getting off the wrong path.

A decade or so ago, Jay and I were hiking outside of Vegas, on Mt. Charleston. We were going around in circles and just couldn't seem to find the trail we were looking for. It turned out that we were on the wrong path, with no trail. I immediately thought of the relationship I'd ended a couple of years back, after too many futile attempts to save it: if you're on the wrong path, no amount of effort is going to get you where you need to be; it'll only wear you down.

I'd found myself in a similar (only much more precarious) situation years before that, in Nicaragua, alone. I was walking around Little Corn Island and got lost in the woods. I thought I was following a trail, but the trail disappeared and I couldn't seem to get out of this patch of forest. There were spiders and spider webs everywhere, and I f*ing hate spiders. After an hour or maybe more, I was exhausted, dehydrated, and scared $hitless (how long did I have before dark? Fittingly, I'd just lost my headlamp). I kept trying to get back to the trail by which I got there, but it kept leading me back to the same circles. Finally, I took a slightly different path that I either hadn't seen before or didn't think could possibly be the right one, and I got out of the forest to safety.

A month or so after that, I was walking around a stunning crater lake outside of Managua when something similar happened: I was following a trail that ended, and I was lost. In that case, I managed to find my way relatively quickly, but it was still scary and it's still analogy worthy: sometimes that trail that got you there, won't get you back, and sometimes the trail that seemed promising once has ceased to exist. The sooner you recognize that and quit grasping for it like the monkeys grasping for the moon, the sooner you can get on the right path.

So here's my mixed metaphor: sometimes you're on the wrong path, and either you genuinely have no idea or you may suspect it but there are temptations along that path that keep you from admitting it. Either way, you go too far down that path before you figure it out, and it takes time to get back out before you can get on the right path. The getting back out can be a bitch--you may not see the way out for a while and you can question whether you'll ever get out--but you're heading in the right direction. It's a process: most of us occasionally find ourselves on the wrong path, but the sooner we realize it and accept it, the sooner we can correct course and get on the path where we still don't necessarily see the holy grail, but we get the shrubbery that gets us out of the forest.