Been thinking about this all week — how the things that feel like detours turn out to be the whole point.
The Opening
I was sitting in traffic on Tuesday, missing a meeting I’d spent three days preparing for, watching the clock tick past the start time while brake lights stretched out ahead of me like a parking lot. And somewhere around minute thirty, after I’d already sent the apologetic text and rescheduled and done all the damage control, I just stopped fighting it. Sat there with the radio off, windows down, watching some guy two lanes over absolutely lose his mind honking at nobody in particular.
That’s when it hit me — this thing I’ve been chewing on for months now about direction. About how we spend so much energy trying to stay on the path that we forget to ask if the path is even taking us somewhere we want to go.
The meeting got rescheduled for Thursday. Turned out the client had their own crisis that morning and barely had their head in the game anyway. The Tuesday version would’ve been a disaster. The Thursday version? We landed the contract. But that’s not really the point.
The point is what I did with those thirty minutes in traffic. Just sat there. Didn’t pull out my phone to fill the space. Didn’t stress-call someone to vent. Just existed in that weird suspended moment where nothing was happening and everything was fine and I had absolutely zero control over any of it.
The universe has a weird way of working things out.
What Direction Actually Means
I think we’ve got direction backwards. We treat it like this fixed thing — north, south, the goal, the plan, the five-year trajectory. You’re either on course or you’re off course. You’re either making progress or you’re wasting time.
But I’ve been noticing something. The moments that changed everything for me — the ones that actually mattered — they didn’t feel like progress when they were happening. They felt like interruptions. Detours. Delays. That time I got laid off and thought my career was over? Led me to the work I actually care about. That project that fell apart at the last second? Introduced me to three people who became essential to everything I built afterward. That relationship that ended badly? Taught me what I actually needed instead of what I thought I wanted.
None of it felt like direction. It felt like chaos.
I keep thinking about ships. Not the romantic sailing-into-the-sunset kind, but the real kind that cross oceans. They don’t travel in straight lines. They can’t. There’s weather, currents, mechanical issues, course corrections every few hours. The route they actually take looks nothing like the route they planned. But they still get there.
Maybe direction isn’t about the path. Maybe it’s about the destination you’re willing to keep adjusting toward. Or maybe — and this is the part that’s been sitting with me — maybe it’s not even about the destination. Maybe it’s about whether you’re becoming more yourself or less yourself along the way.
Because I’ve been on the “right path” and felt completely wrong. And I’ve been completely off-script and felt more aligned than ever.
The Things That Sit There
There’s this moment that keeps coming back to me. Few years ago, I’m in a coffee shop, supposed to be working on this proposal that’s going to change everything. Big opportunity. Career-defining type of thing. And I cannot make myself care. I’m staring at the screen, rewriting the same paragraph for the fourth time, and all I can think about is this conversation I had the night before with someone who asked me what I actually wanted to build.
Not what would be successful. Not what would make sense. What I actually wanted to build.
I didn’t have an answer. Realized I hadn’t asked myself that question in years. I’d been so focused on the next logical step, the smart move, the thing that made sense on paper, that I’d completely lost track of the thing underneath all of that. The reason I started any of this in the first place.
I didn’t submit that proposal. Probably cost me six months of momentum, at least on paper. But something shifted. Started asking different questions. Started saying no to things that looked good but felt hollow. Started saying yes to things that scared me but felt true.
Some days you just gotta sit with it.
The hard part isn’t figuring out where you’re going. The hard part is admitting when where you’re going isn’t actually where you want to end up. The hard part is changing direction when you’re already halfway there. When you’ve already told everyone the plan. When turning around feels like admitting you were wrong.
But here’s what I keep coming back to: being wrong about direction isn’t failure. It’s information. It’s the universe saying “not that way” so you can find the way that actually fits.
The Close
I don’t have this figured out. Still miss meetings. Still take wrong turns. Still commit to things and then realize three weeks in that they’re pulling me away from what matters instead of toward it.
But I’m starting to trust the detours more. Starting to see them less as interruptions and more as redirections. Starting to understand that sometimes the traffic jam is saving you from the accident up ahead, even if you never see it.
That thing you’ve been sitting with all week — the question about whether you’re on the right path, whether you should keep going or change course, whether this is all leading somewhere or you’re just spinning — I don’t think it needs an answer. Not yet, anyway.
I think it just needs space. Room to breathe. Permission to be unresolved.
Every day’s a hustle. But some days, the hustle is just showing up and admitting you don’t know where you’re going. Trusting that the not-knowing is part of the path too.