Recalculating

I’m not always a fan of car navigation. Most of the time it’s great, especially when I could get totally lost, but every once in awhile, I remember it’s not as good as a human brain in full operation.

One night my husband Tom and I grabbed a coupon for a new restaurant offering a swordfish special with pumpkin ravioli. At first, it directed us right instead of left out of our neighborhood. Since we knew better than that, we turned left as usual, forcing the nav to adjust. After zigzagging multiple directions, back tracking south to go north, and getting stuck in snail-paced traffic, we finally arrived, only to discover that the destination was a mere few blocks south of a major freeway intersection. We could have easily been there in half the time.

As fallible human beings, we sometimes take a complicated route toward our goals. We:

Zigzag for lack of a clear vision.
Change direction again and again.
Detour because of obstacles.
Get stuck at a snail’s pace when we could already be where we want to go.

Why does that happen? For one thing, things don’t always go as planned. But also, sometimes we depend too much on those things and not enough on our own abilities to:

Get a clear vision.
Make a plan that’s sensible but not so rigid that we can’t be creative when necessary.
Foresee obstacles and avoid as many as possible.
Do everything we can to find the most effective and efficient route.

Thankfully, we have the intellectual tools to do all those things, but we do need to apply them wisely.

Thought for today: Focus on the destination and devise a smart but flexible plan ahead of time.