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9 Miles

Sometimes life is a spiritual journey. Often, it's only traveled in your mind. This time, it's a physical passage.

There's a rather large road that is very close to my house. As long as I've lived here, I've never traveled it from end-to-end -- until now. I guess I live right around the middle of this road and had gone to certain extremes on this road, down to one end and beyond many times. But I'd never been to the other end. I didn't know how it started. It's kind of funny, but it starts in a suburban neighborhood where you might envision people gathering for a July 4th block party. Mostly, I'd say it's two lanes but gets up to four lanes. At it's start, it's one lane.

That's what happens, isn't it? We start out small, wind our way through a neighborhood, thicken a bit in the middle, get thicker and more dense as we go, and then one day we end. We look at life through the car window. We see all the change, the construction, the beauty that stands beside us. And at the end of the day, we see the sunset... so we take off our sunglasses and we turn on the headlights. It's harder to see. We know what's out there but we have a hard time filling in the details anymore. We can't change gears and reverse what we have -- we have to keep driving, moving forward.

Maybe we have driven these roads before... who's to say? We're all in our little cars going about our daily lives and every now and then it happens. Sometimes we make a turn we shouldn't have. Someone gets in our way and we bump into them, or worse. We may be traveling too fast and miss something. We may be traveling too slow and not get to where we need to be. We may be trying to drive with our eyes closed, in the dark, with only the emergency flashers to illuminate the highway.

It just goes on, whether we like it or not. Tomorrow, I'll leave my house... get in my car and drive to work. When the work-day is done, I'll drive home again. If I need something from the store I'll drive up and get it. If I need to see someone, I'll make the journey to see them. If I listen to certain pieces of music, it's like traveling without moving -- theater of the mind.

On occasion, I just get in my car and drive. No destination, no purpose. I usually end up back home. It ends up being both a spiritual journey and a physical passage.

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