Try a Different Path. Make a Life.

            My foot slid on a rock as I stepped across a stream and I thought for sure I would fall. Falling at any age, and especially at my age, isn’t a pleasurable experience so I wanted to do anything to not fall. But there I was: stuck in the middle of a stream with higher-than-usual water from the recent rain and no idea how to take my next step.

I had crossed this stream dozens of times before, always using the same rocks as my route to get from one side of the water to the other. But that well-traveled and predictable path was of no use to me now.

            That well-traveled and predictable path may not be of use to us.

We humans can really work ourselves into some lovely habits when we repeatedly use our bodies in the same way in the same places over and over again. These ways of being in the world become memorized by our bodies until our body takes over completely and we don’t even have to actively think about what it is we are doing and why.

            Take, for example, getting up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. If someone would ask me how many steps it is from the side of my bed to the bathroom I wouldn’t have an answer, but my body absolutely knows the strides it will take to round the corner of my bedframe, stop in front of the door, and turn in to the bathroom.

            The path from the side of my bed to the bathroom has become habitualized until it is embedded in my body so completely that I can make that trip without a light on, without a stumble, without a stubbed toe, without running into a door, and without even needing to be fully awake.

            The path from my bed to the bathroom is probably a path I don’t want to shake up too much. It makes sense for that trip to be nearly automatic.

            Other habitual paths, however, might be working us into a rut, as some people put it.

            I’m in a bit of a rut, we might say, without really thinking about what a rut is.

            Have you ever been in a car or truck when the ground was soft, soggy, muddy, or snowy and you’re trying to go somewhere but the tires can’t quite gain any traction and their spinning starts to create a rut? When this has happened to me, the tracks made by the spinning tires have become deeper and deeper until I knew I was in big trouble.

            One time it was snowy and those tire tracks worked their way deep into the snow, below the snow, and into the rock and mud beneath it. So there I was, rocking my car back and forth – back and forth – back and forth, trying to make my way out of the rut that I created.

            One time it was in the torrential rain and I was on a farm, parked in the grass, and the ground was so soft that my car just sunk into the softness. I barely touched the gas pedal, hoping to allow the tires to gain some traction, but I still dug myself into a rut. It took a really long time and a lot of extra work to finally get out of that rut.

            In both of these situations, I would have been better off taking a different path entirely: perhaps asking someone else for a ride, or asking someone who had a towing chain to hook up to the car from the beginning, or just wait it out.  

            Sometimes we know we’re working our way into a rut and we do it anyway because we can’t imagine another path.

            Sometimes we don’t know we’re creating a rut until we’re chin-deep in something we don’t know how to get out of.

            Using the same, habituated, automatic path to the bathroom at night is not a rut; it’s helpful.

            Using the same, habituated, automatic path in other parts of our lives might create a rut that limits or dulls our experience of life.

            Taking a different path in simple parts of our daily lives might just bring vitality and wide-awakeness to us in beautiful ways.

            Let’s get back to those slippery rocks that I found myself stuck on when my usual path wouldn’t work.

            I stopped. Steadied myself. Then looked around for a dry-looking rock within stepping distance.

            I looked above me, upstream, only to see water flowing over all of the rocks that I might be able to reach.

            I looked below me, downstream – which was also slightly downhill – and there seemed to be one or two possibilities for getting me out of this precarious situation without landing in the water.

            But my body didn’t want to do it.

            That’s not the way we go, it seemed to say.

            I even swung my arms a little toward the dry rocks but the rest of my body resisted.

            We don’t do that.

            So I stood up straight again and felt my heart rate start to speed up.

            Baboom. Baboom. Baboom.

            I contemplated taking the chance of falling downstream and hopping toward the rocks that had always been dependable, but that habitual path was not a good one on this day. And boy, did I really have to convince my body of that basic fact.

            We cannot take the regular path, I said.

            We cannot deviate from our regular path, I felt.

            This is the moment when I grounded myself into the rocks on which I was standing, inhaled long and deep into my hips to feel more secure, and breathed into the baboom-baboom-baboom of my heart.

            Then I slowed down my breath.

            Then my heart slowed too.

            You can do that you know, right? Breathe with the accelerated rhythm of your heart and once they are working together you can slow down your breath and your heart rate will follow?

            Intentional breathing can do a lot of things.

            Intentional breathing helped me take a different path that day.

            My body still wanted to refuse, but with my stilled breath and quieted heartbeat I awkwardly hopped toward a dry rock.

            It worked.

            Then I was closer to another dry rock, one way downstream on a path I had never taken before, and I hopped to it.

            It worked again.

            And there I was, taking a completely different route across the water, seeing the stream from a completely different perspective, and feeling just uneasy enough in my feet and legs that my eyesight was more keen, my hearing more alert, my balance more conscientious, my body more aware.

            I made it to the other side of that slippery-rock-filled-water, paused, took a breath, and looked behind me.

            I needed that new path. It shook me out of my mindlessness. It gave mindfulness a chance.

            Taking the same path all the time because it makes perfect sense to do so – like finding the bathroom in the dark – is fine. Taking the same path all the time because you’ve given in to the automaton of your body – like the way you drive to a friend’s, or the walk you take in the neighborhood, or how you collapse inside your home after work, or the way you pick up your phone in the morning – is stealing some life away from you.

            Maybe the rocks are wet and you’re forced out of your rut into a different path.

And maybe, just maybe, you pause and breathe and decide to shake it up all on your own and try a different path to make sure it’s not a rut you’re making, but a life.