I took a detour about four years ago, and if you had asked me some six years ago (sometime before the unexpected happened), I would have told you how I already had my life all planned out and knew exactly where I was going.
The plan was simple: finish school in a few years time, go for the one-year mandatory service year, get a good job after, and begin building my life in preparation for a home I can call mine.
Everything has been well mapped out; all I needed was to do my own quota and not give up. Just to make sure I'm moving forward.
But then life happened without giving me a warning, and that was when I found myself on another road entirely, a road I never planned on or wanted to travel on. I thought it would just be a matter of days, but then days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years. All of my plans began to fall off one after the other; school was on hold, and my life was on a pause. I watched as my friends began to graduate, get a good job, and build a home of theirs, but I was there... Stagnant. I couldn't even understand why it had to be me.
I hated that detour so much that I fought it at a time.
Because tell me... Why me? Why now? Why? What did I do wrong? What was my offense?
I couldn't get an answer to my question, and that itself was frustrating.
Along the line, I accepted the detour; it is my reality already. And that was how I stopped measuring my life with the timeline I had created for myself. I stopped asking why I wasn't where I should be yet and began to pay attention to where I was. And slowly things began to change. The new unexpected lane that I took began to teach me various things about life. It taught me patience, it taught me what humans are really like, it taught me to celebrate myself and my little wins, it taught me gratitude, and it taught me to appreciate people, especially those who stayed with me even when I had nothing exciting about my life.
Some years later, I was able to bring some of my dreams to reality and was able to as well reach some of the destinations I thought I had lost forever.
The catch now is that I arrived as a different person. I'm kinder, loving, caring, and more of a listener. The detour could have made me uncaring, unloving, and bitter, and all considering what I went through, but I refused to allow that. Instead of becoming bitter, I chose to be a better person.
I arrived as a different person entirely, someone who sees beyond the silence and smile of others, someone who understands that a smile on the outside could be hiding a battle on the inside, someone who's slow to judge others, someone who's ready to listen and understand the other person.
And honestly, there are times I still sit myself down to think about what my life would have looked like if everything had gone according to my original script. Maybe my journey would have been sweet, smooth, easier, and faster... Who knows
But then, one thing I'm not convinced of is that my life would have been better. I say that because the earlier version of me wouldn't have seen life the way I now see it; that version of me wouldn't have understood people the way I now do; that version of me would know very little about hope, faith, gratitude, and prayer.
That detour brought a lot of things my way; it brought people my way too. It also helped me discover some parts of myself that only difficulty and hardship could have revealed, all of which are now a part of my story today.
Today, I don't see that season of my life as a waste of time anymore; I see it as a shaping and molding time. I now understand that life most times is not about reaching your destination as quickly as you want, but about who I am and who I become in my journey to get there.
Some roads are smooth, some are rough, some are straightforward, while some are filled with unexpected turns, and none of us get to choose which path/road life places before us; the only thing we get to choose is what we take/carry along with us on the journey.
I would have arrived sooner if my life had followed my own script; maybe I would have also been able to avoid these tears, spending, debts, disappointment, moments of uncertainty, and heartbreaks. But then, I would have also missed out on the lessons that I learned, which are now the core of who I am today.
Now, I don't see those seasons of my life as the worst time or chapter of life; I see it as a detour. Not as if I enjoyed it or wanted it, but it led me somewhere, taught me things, and opened my eyes to see what my original road wouldn't have shown or taught me.
Today, I can say that that road I didn't choose became that which helped prepare me for the life I'm already meant to live.
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Images are mine.
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