field of sun flowers

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“A wrong turn lead me to a field of flowers and suddenly I’m second guessing every wrong turn in my life.”

a thousand words tumblr

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Well. I have never analyzed nor have I seen any research with regard to how much time we use to plan out the ‘right moves’ to make in our careers and lives. I planned what happenedimagine, if a study were done, between consciously planning and the ‘in the moment analysis’ planning, those two ‘life plannings’ would represent some inordinately absurd amount of our time.

When I saw the opening quote I began thinking about how often most of us attach ‘bad’ to wrong turns and how less often we attach ‘good’ to wrong turns.

Simplistically, we attach wrong to bad.

Wrong turn = Bad choice/decision

Sure.

Sometimes that is true.

But I think I could argue that a wrong turn simply puts you in some place you hadn’t planned on <and you assume the plan was a good plan because … well … you had planned it>. Therefore, in our minds, the unplanned place is a bad place because it … well … was an unplanned place <some circular logic which seems kind of doomed to conclude bad even if it may actually be good>.

Setting aside the whole planning thing, turns are part of life.

leading one wayLife is not one huge straight boulevard you place your car on and start driving.

Life is more often like seemingly random patchwork of inner city streets with dead ends, one ways and no left hand turns which seemingly are only placed at only the intersections which you had planned to make a left hand turn.

In other words, whether you plan the shit out of your life or not we all make a shitload of turns in Life.

Some are planned.

Some are unplanned.

Some you have the time to invest a lot of time thinking about.

Some you cannot invest a lot of time thinking about.

Some end up in a good place.

Some end up in a bad place.

I imagine my only point is that sometimes, maybe more often than you think, a wrong turn puts you in a different, better, more interesting, place. A wrong turn exposes you to something you maybe never imagined you would ever see, ever face or ever think about. And that is the ultimate value of a wrong turn.

It exposes you to something beyond the plan you ever envisioned.

To be clear. I don’t propose building a Life around a disproportionate amount of purposeful wrong turning. field dirt road sunset

That kind of seems a little chaotic and absolutely suggests a shitload of wasted time & energy.

However.

Maybe we think about Life more as a shitload of turns, i.e., just a blanket ‘shitload’, instead of categorizing them simply as right turns and wrong turns.

Life is not binary and turns are not binary.

Turns are turns and more often than not they don’t lead you some place you can never leave they simply lead you to some place.

Ponder.

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Written by Bruce