Getting From Here to There 11-21-11

Anderson, South Carolina

America is the most mobile society the world’s ever known. Distances Americans are willing to drive to their jobs are legendary. One man is known to drive 379 miles round trip every day from his ordinary house to an ordinary job. His commute is seven hours. He rarely sees his family or house in the light of day. A man I once worked with drove 142 miles one way every day to our office to work in an ordinary job. Each year some twenty percent of us actually move our households; disrupting long-standing friendships, neighborhood connections, ad infinitum. My own street has become an avenue of virtual strangers.

It’s hard to fathom why someone would be willing to drive seven hours to work, consuming all his free time and most of his earnings. Just paying for gasoline requires more than $1,100 a month, not to mention wear and tear on a vehicle nearly consumed in a year’s time. Does this man and millions of others trapped in long commutes ever really think about where they are going in life? Is an ordinary vinyl house in the suburbs worth the huge environmental, economic, and relational costs? Many of my friends are trapped in commutes reducing their discretionary income and time to the barest minimums.

Our car-based culture continues to be reflected in the physical landscape about us. In the early 1990s David Kunstler in his landmark The Geography of Nowhere described a bleak faceless landscape where we have no sense of place or belonging, one wholly car-dependent. Once-distinctive human-scaled townscapes have given way to identical franchised environments devoid of character. In the intervening twenty years since he wrote his sobering observations of American land use, we’ve progressed further into his science-fiction depiction of the world. Alas, it’s not science fiction. Bucolic places present in my small town two decades ago have long since been paved over. Pleasing pastoral two-lane roads in the country have morphed into vast five lane-highways congested with a plethora of retail businesses, mostly oriented towards cars, their sales and service, and the feeding of their drivers with a hundred drive-through windows. Presently four vast gas station/convenience complexes are being constructed on four highways coming into our modest town. There’s no way these facilities can cost less than $15 million and we already have far too many gas stations.

Since Kunstler described our world we’ve seen the advent of high-energy LED sign boards in front of many establishments, providing distracting multi-colored bids to get us to slow down long enough to leave deposits of our hard earned incomes in various establishments. They apparently work. Why else would a business spend up to $40,000 for such a display board? My town is looking ever more like a miniature Las Vegas at night with its main street a twinkling mass of high output LEDs.

My longest commute in decades consists of my present one, driving two miles to Meals on Wheels to pack hot meals for house-bound senior citizens. Even in this ultra-short commute I receive much ‘instruction’ about how to live life. One billboard informs me “Happiness begins here … Love, Peace … Anderson Mitsubishi.” Our car-based culture has hundreds of millions of us believing cars are magic carpets able to take us to Nirvana. Mitsubishi cars may be quality autos at fair prices but it’s unlikely they will bring me love and peace. There is no shortage of people who’ve found financial bondage with their new cars rather than happiness.

A short distance further along my commute another billboard tells me “It’s where you finish the night that counts.” Another version across town states “It matters only where you finish the night.” A local tavern believes my day will end better if it ends with me in a drunken stupor on one of its barstools. My daily work with alcoholics suggests days don’t end so well that end on barstools. I’ve had acquaintances tell me they’ve awakened in jail cells under $50,000 bond and have no idea why they are there. Invariably they describe having taken a seat on someone’s stool the night before. Perhaps these billboards unwitting speak a profoundly important truth. It really matters greatly where we finish the night.

In our mobile culture we have little concept of where our lives are going. If billboards and LED displays can provoke us into making imprudent impulsive decisions casting us into overwhelming debt for new cars, into staying on barstools until closing time and finding ourselves awaking on the cold cement floor of a cell perhaps we need to review our itineraries. A sound byte I’ve always found useful is “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” If one doesn’t have a life plan, it’s not likely one is going to end up at a favorable destination. Without goals and plans, one can arrive in the winter of life only to have bitter regrets at having wasted the vast opportunities life has to offer.

In John Trent’s Life Mapping, the reader is given life strategies, a map, a plan for traversing the sometimes torturous terrain of life. As a prominent family counselor with extensive insight into human nature, Trent has great understanding of the emotional obstacles making getting from here to there less than straightforward. He also understands where true wisdom comes from. It doesn’t come from LED message boards or billboards on the highway. As the cover of his book states, Life Mapping will help you get where you want to go regardless of where you’ve been.

When we seek the One Who is the Source of all wisdom and ask only for knowledge of His will for our lives and the power to carry that out, we set ourselves up for the possibility of grand journeys to places unimagined. We can awaken to Ectachrome moments of wonder rather than despairing moments of confusion in bankruptcy court or prison cells of our own making.