Lost on the path of least resistance

Sometimes we need to set reminders for ourselves because we have a tendency, and even tenacity for droning on day in and day out. Some changes in life occur so slowly that we don't even notice them. Night becomes day, day becomes night, and there's been bad news on every channel for so long that unhorrendous news is now the good news, and it's still worse than the bad news was just a few years ago. Unless it's just a rehash of the exact same news that went nowhere any other time it's been in the news.

Many who have arrived here begin to look around for the road that got them here, but most people don't remember driving to work, let alone which wrong turn brought them into the bad neighbourhood, ebbing in the slow onset of what eventually grows into absolute terror. It starts out innocently enough that simply going this way or that way and something familiar will appear until it does not. Instead only things that sound vaguely familiar but look nothing like what was familiar appear in places you'd never expect them to and at less and less frequent intervals as panic begins. Where is this place? Didn't there used to be life bustling at all corners around here?

So you fire up the phone in your pocket to search for a way back to familiar territory only to find that there ain't no service here, no there ain't no service here. So you do what all tech support people tell you to do, you turn it off and back on, and there still ain't no service here. Finally you stumble on a friendly neighbourhood policeman and say you need to get to the intersection of backpack road and the pressure cooker highway, and then you're in a whole new how did I get here, aren't you?

It's too bad you weren't paying more attention to things, because you would have seen the stage hands tearing down and rearranging props in your rearview mirror if you had. No the road that brought you here was the path of least resistance: a straight and unwinding path without intersections save for all those inbound merges with nary an exit in sight, except this one, and that's not really where you want to be, is it? Do you think maybe it's time to try a different course of action, maybe going against the flow of traffic? Me too.

-DIrtyKID©