Have you ever been driving on a winding road on a foggy night? It can be scary; it seems like the headlights can't keep up with the car and barely show what's ahead before you're on top of the next curve, hill, or stop sign.
Could you imagine what that drive would be like if we didn't know where the road was going? What if it dead ended out of nowhere? What if it ran right off a cliff? How far ahead do those headlights reach, anyway? Can we stop in time if the unexpected shows up?
We all don't stay home, paralyzed by the fear of these worries. There's a trust - a knowing - that the road ahead will be safe to travel, that the only section we need to see at a given moment is the one illuminated by our headlights. Just a couple hundred feet. Not a mile, certainly not all the way to our destination. One curve at a time. All we need to see is the road immediately ahead.
If we worried about having enough visibility to see our entire route clearly, we would never go anywhere at all.
I think about this often; taking the metaphor of a long night time drive to heart as the journey through life. It's always foggy, isn't it? And our headlights never seem to reach far enough for us to know what's ahead! It can be terrifying, to a debilitating degree for some. We might even be tempted to just pull over and stop.
But pulling over won't get us anywhere at all, so we have to trust the little bit our headlights show us and continue ahead. The road is fine, and the headlights are working... it's just a foggy night. A couple hundred feet at a time can take you anywhere you need to go.
So don't worry about what's just outside the reach of your headlights. You can see all you need in each moment. Focus on that, drive safely, and enjoy the ride!
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