Anyone who thinks that great writers or great composers possess some particularly rare gift that allows them to write or compose something fantastic in one sitting is far from the reality of the situation.
Last Sunday, I was at Mass when the priest, during his homily, spoke of a real-life parable to help us understand what our “life plan” might be.
No one knows where they’ll be two steps from now, or two days from now. We can only see as far as the path before us allows.
Just like a car driving at night toward a destination more than 10 kilometers away. There’s no way for the driver of that car to see the destination. The headlights illuminate only the nearest part of the road. Our role as drivers of this vehicle called life is simply to steer toward the right path—the few meters ahead that are illuminated—and decide whether we need to keep accelerating, or whether we need to slow down, or even stop to prevent the car from veering off the road or colliding with something.
There’s no way for us to know if an obstacle will appear in half a minute, or if, on the other hand, the road will be clear and we’ll be able to safely speed up so we can reach our destination sooner.
That’s how life is. We can see where our foot will land if we take the next step. That’s all that’s asked of us: to have the courage to take the next step. If that step wasn’t the right one, we won’t stop walking because of the step we’ve already taken. Our next steps—or the meters we travel behind the wheel of life’s car—will be crucial for correcting our course or preventing us from continuing in the wrong direction.
Imagine that when we left home, we were driving to our cousins’ house. We didn’t know the route to our destination very well, even though we knew the people we’d meet at the end of the trip quite well. Imagine, too, that this simple journey was a representation of our life. Imagine what it would be like if navigation systems didn’t allow us to adjust our route according to road conditions or the obstacles we encountered… At the first detour that came up—or that we were forced to take—the GPS would stop showing us where our destination was and wouldn’t recalculate the route to get us there.
Imagine what life would be like if we couldn't make mistakes, or if we always had to be sure we were on the right path?
We would never take a step without being absolutely certain it was the right one...
Image by Kai Pilger from Pixabay
Original text written by 
