Turn Left at the Joshua Tree

This spring I made a trip back to California for my aunt and uncle's seventieth wedding anniversary. Seventy years. In a world where marriage so often seems confused and disposable, that felt worth crossing the country to celebrate. It was also a gift to see family I had not seen in more than a decade. My husband, Dana, and my eighty-four-year-old father came along. Dad had not been on a plane in over fifty-five years. We have made our home in West Virginia, but we are all Californians underneath it. We left in 1998, and some part of each of us never entirely did.

On one of our days there, we decided to drive from San Pedro out to Cathedral City. If you know Southern California, you know that is a good number of miles and a generous helping of freeway, depending on the route. Los Angeles is famous for two things on the road, and they are the freeways and the traffic. I had prepared myself for both. What I had not braced for was that I would be driving so many navigators.

And somewhere along that drive, with everyone in the car so sure of the way, I realized I was getting a living picture of how our inner world works.

The voices in the car

The first navigator was my father's memory. His memory is good, truly. But this is the man who tells you to turn left at the Joshua tree, in the desert, where there are thousands of them. We were driving through places he grew up more than eighty years ago, and he had a stories for the miles. Where he used to work. Where the people he knew once lived. What cars they drove. I loved the stories or at least a part of me did. They simply were not always directions. At one point he said to me, "Who needs GPS when you can find your way?" And he was not entirely wrong. I could find my way from one place to the next but I cannot predict when an accident will shut down a freeway and make a different choice.  Dad has found his way for eighty-four years. He was navigating by a landscape that lives mostly in him now.

Then there was Dana, who grew up in the South Bay, in Torrance, and who is both an engineer and an idealist. He has two modes, and they took turns. One is the nostalgia, all caught up in how things used to be. The other wants very much to know which way I am going and whether there is a more efficient way to get there. Same man, two navigators, sometimes talking over each other in a single breath.

While we were at one location we also had our friend Melinda, who lives in Cathedral City. Melinda speaks fluent street name, as if I carry her map in my head. She wanted to spare us the traffic. I wanted to see the town. She was oriented to the practical present and to avoiding what hurts, and she assumed I shared her frame.

And then there was me. I had my own GPS plugged in not to mention memories. I had lived in this area for much of my life. I was calm, connected to the situation, fairly confident I would get us where we needed to be, traffic and all. That felt good. It felt steady.

The part that got annoyed

Here is the honest part. While all those voices were offering me directions, judging the car next to me, reminding me how it was fifty years ago, and throwing extra thoughts into my process, I noticed something rise up in me. A part of me got annoyed. Not agitated, nothing dramatic. Just a quiet irritation that all these voices were trying to tell me what to do, and that they were mucking with my own clarity and peace.

And that was the moment the whole thing clicked. The annoyance was itself a navigator. It was a part of me that wanted to protect my sense of leadership and competency and in trying to protect it, it pulled me a half-step out of the very steadiness it was guarding.

This is how our parts work. This is how it feels on the inside. We can be settled and grounded, genuinely connected to what is true and present, and still the voices come. They add thoughts. They judge. They create confusion. They make us doubt and wonder and second-guess. And here is the tender thing worth saying out loud. They are not the enemy. Every one of those navigators was trying to help. My father wanted me to find the way. Dana wanted the stories remembered and the route made efficient. Melinda wanted to spare me the traffic. The annoyed part of me wanted to protect my peace. Love filled that car. It just arrived as a half-dozen competing instructions, and someone still had to keep both hands on the wheel.

That someone is not another, louder voice. It is the calm center that can hear all of them, take what is useful, thank the rest, and keep driving.

What the old map cannot know

Here is the detail I keep coming back to. The 91 freeway has added an HOV lane, with its own rules about who may drive in it and when. My father's memory, as deep and real and eighty years true as it is, cannot tell me that. The stories cannot tell me that. Only current information about the road in front of me can.

That is what our parts are like. They carry the truth of the moment they were formed. They are loyal to the map they were handed, often long ago, often when we were young and the road looked different. What they cannot always see is that the road has changed. That we have changed. That this present moment holds information the past simply does not have.

Sometimes we need to update information.

Notice what trusting the GPS did not require of me. I did not have to silence my father or wave off Dana's stories or dismiss the love in that car. I only had to stay connected to the source that actually knew the road as it is today, while the lanes were narrow and the drivers around me were not all being careful. I needed presence, not commentary. I needed my eyes on a road that exists now.

An invitation for the week

So here is what I would offer you. Sometime this week, when you feel the chorus start up inside, the one that judges and rushes and reminds you how it used to be and wonders if you are doing it wrong, see if you can notice it the way I noticed my car, full of navigators. Not as enemies to silence, but as parts trying, in their own way, to help. You can thank them. You can let them know you hear them. And then you can return your hands to the wheel and your attention to the road as it actually is, trusting the steady center that knows the way.

Seventy years of marriage, it turns out, is not so different from a long drive. It is not the absence of competing voices. It is the willingness to stay in the seat, return again and again to what is true and present, and keep going together down a road that keeps changing.

May you travel it with peace.