Don't worry over a distant journey

This fifty-year body, with a considerably lesser mental age, cannot handle all the eight hundred miles in one single day.  The spirit is always willing, but the flesh is damn weak, and is weakening with every passing year that is marked by fewer hair on top, more grey even down there, and wrinkles all over.  While I certainly would prefer at least a few of these signs of aging to be otherwise, I wear them proudly most of the times as my medals of having lived my own life.

Thus, I stopped to spend the night at a motel.

The older I get, it is also the case anymore that motels make me feel uncomfortable. As if I am in a shady place where drug deals happen and that at any minute my car can get busted, cops will come bursting in, and that I will have to run for my life.  I live way too much a sheltered existence, I worry, and I force myself to step out of my comfort zone. It ain't easy.

The always curious me explored the content of the drawer in the bedside table.  Surprise, surprise it was not merely a Bible but also this:

Jing Si Aphorisms?

Googling had to wait for a later time.  I had to look into that book, of course.  I picked it up and opened up a page.

Life is full of coincidences, which should not surprise us at all, given that we live in a probabilistic world. Inspirational coincidences are what the religious prefer to refer to as miracles.  My father, for instance, who believes in his gods, is convinced that miracles happen all the time but that we don't watch out for them.  The atheist me, on the other hand, is convinced that wonderful coincidences happen all the time but that we don't pay attention to them.

The reflective personality in me does watch out for those coincidences, and sometimes do spot them. Like when I opened the Jing Si Aphorisms and looked at a page in random:

Here I am on a 800-mile road trip, which at the end, with all the detours, could easily become a 2,000-mile round trip, opening a page in a book I had never seen before, and the content there tells me not to worry about a distant journey as long as one finds the way.

Of course, the journey that is referred to is not a mere physical journey, but it is life that is metaphorically being addressed.  And in that, the page tells me that it is never too late.  For blossom.

Wonderful inspirational coincidences.

I didn't worry much after that over the car being broken into or about the police sirens.

I slept well.

The morning came.  The car was there.  Without any damage.  So was the driver.

I resumed the journey, hoping I knew the way.  Or, hoping I can at least find my way.