Narrow Paths

Life is inevitably a narrowing… until we decide to dig ourselves out.

I’m in Providence this week, chaperoning my daughter’s chorus festival. Providence received an unprecedented amount of snow two days before our arrival: over three feet. As we arrived, one day after a travel ban preventing entry into the city was lifted, the place was still digging out. Streets were closed. Sidewalks covered. Piles of snow as high as buildings. Police and heavy machinery everywhere.

I haven’t been here in a long time. A lifetime ago, Brown University was my second choice for colleges. But I applied early decision to Middlebury. I got in, and never looked back.

Until now. That one choice set me on my life’s path. It’s been a great life—full of interesting people and places and professional and personal adventures.

But the nature of a path is that it winds one particular direction. Definitionally, a path is a course or direction in which a person is moving. Sure, you can adjust here and there. But with each moment of decision, the path is refined in its path-ness. It is appropriate, then, that the antonym to a path is a closing.

As I get older, I feel the closings more, the losses of potentialities all the possible paths promised. It is a relentless, creeping, catches-up-with-you kind of grief. As a young woman, I used to crave a path and did everything to create and follow one. Suddenly, I feel trapped by the very path I strived so hard to forge. When, exactly, did that shift happen? I was too busy looking at my feet to notice.

The sidewalks of Providence are not yet cleared of snow. I find myself winding through narrow paths, just wide enough to walk on but constricting. They are, in places, treacherous. Sometimes the narrow paths redirect you to a corner or a street you weren’t intending to end up on. There’s a mutual sense of helplessness and surrender to the elements emitted in the eyes of fellow travelers. Sometimes, ankle deep in slush, I look up and am envious of someone across the way who seems to be on more sturdy ground.

As I meandered my way to the Brown campus, I felt like I was watching a movie of a path I didn’t follow half a lifetime ago. It’s not regret, exactly, that I feel. More like a stirring within, an inner knowing that some part of me lit up once with the possibilities of this particular path. I watched the kids, decades younger now, jumping the snowbanks and walking in the middle of streets. That’s the thing about youth… you can’t see any path clearly. Lived paths only exist in retrospect, the sum of the micro and macro decisions we make every moment of every day. Only time illuminates the path in the past tense, only after you have walked it.

I wonder, as I walk now, whether it is too late, too hard to change paths? Deconstructing and diverging from the paths we painstakingly construct takes energy and fortitude. It takes a returning to the altar of unknowable possibility. It takes getting on your knees and submitting to those inner stirrings that make you feel alive but that also scare you.

And then there are the roadblocks and detours we don’t choose. Those hurdles that are placed in front of us for reasons or randomness unknown. I can feel my cousin’s presence in these snow covered streets. In every impeccably designed room and storefront. Three years ago we were both walking our own paths and breast cancer decided to get in our way. Her earthly path ended. Mine didn’t, at least not yet. I can’t help but feel her energy, unrestrained, omniscient, here, reminding me that we are not actually in control of our destination. We are just meant to take one blind step. And then another. And remember to feel the sun on our face. And to meet each other’s eyes with a knowing compassion.

Today the paths are a little wider in Providence than yesterday. Perhaps, then, widening is a worthy practice. An intentional act of digging out of our entrenchment, of acknowledging the ways we have narrowed ourselves unnecessarily. Perhaps returning to our paths not chosen can remind us not of what we have lost, but of the labyrinth of life that remains all around us.