stay the course part 3 (but pay attention)

this post will be quick.

on 6/23/2023 i posted snicholsblog.com/2023/06/stay-the-course about how when i drive by this one interchange that i panic that i won’t be able to get off on my usual 10th street exit.  and we all laughed about how

every

single

time

i easily get off at the exit i want. i just have to wait until the right and easy time to get over.

 

that is, until this past friday, 7/7/2023 i got off easily. 

what happened on that day, you ask? 

well, i sailed through the interchange of two highways, confident that once again i could stay in my lane and get off at 10th street. happily listening to my voicemails through our car’s speakers, i decided to stay one further lane to the left than usual, figuring if i could get over one lane, i could get over two. and that turned out to be wrong for the first time ever.

it turned out that sometime between 6/23/2023 and 7/7/2023 this entire stretch of highway 50 was reengineered so that there’s now a wall of concrete separating the 2 right lanes, including our exit lane from the rest of the freeway lanes. it’s temporary construction, like it’ll be there for months, but it can’t be ignored. so this time i looked on in dismay at the lanes i couldn’t access as i had to drive across the sacramento river, into west sacramento and go on surface streets back over the tower bridge to head into my neighborhood from the northwest instead of southeast. 

the spiritual lesson for me here is: pay attention. just because something has been one way before doesn’t mean that it will continue to be. relax, trust, and pay attention