It's a dark twenty minutes after seven this morning. Being warm for this time of year, somewhere around forty degrees, this has been a light winter and there's not much snow on the ground. It's a foggy morning in Northern Michigan. Due to this, despite the roads being clear, it isn't easy to see more than a few cars in front of us. My fourteen-year-old son and I are driving to town. We're talking some nonsense about how the TikTok'er in a goofy video I just made my son watch is a better rapper than Eminem on the way to his middle school and then my office. He disagrees, and we poke fun at each other about it.
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That's when we come to the stop light at Zimmerman and West Silver Lake Roads. At this time of day, the traffic here is bustling. Everyone from our corner of Grand Traverse County is funneling through here to get their kids to school, and to their jobs on the west end of Traverse City. As we slowly approach the intersection fixated at the top of this hill I am presented with a thought-inspiring visual. All we can see in front of us is a line of about seven or eight sets of brake lights, each fading a bit more into the foggy morning darkness towards the stop light, that the dark haze hasn't revealed to us just yet.
"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there." -Lewis Carroll
My first thought is "I wish there was a back road right here so we could break free from this restrictive traffic". Then the analogy grew in my mind's eye. This was a visual representation of people stuck in a structure of toxic habits. Like a line of drivers with limited visibility, droning on day to day only making progress when the system in place decides a green light is deserved to keep the flow of traffic moving just enough to let the individuals progress at the programmer's leisure. This visual was unsettling to me and I felt trapped. Why did this feel so familiar to me?
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It made me think of my life before finding long-term freedom from my SUD addiction. It reminded me of the droning line I was stuck in until I found that less-traveled road that I could progress in and break free from the system that had formed around me, keeping me contained in what seemed like a dark haze of controlled progress. When, actually, there wasn't any progress happening at all. But then I found Recovery Road and broke free from that droning traffic.
That backcountry Recovery Road saved my life. Flip on your blinker and take the turn.
Until next time..
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