Getting Off the Highway

Last week, we talked about the couple form, and looked at how it invisibly encourages and moves us towards a certain set of life choices, naturalizing them along the way. We used the metaphor of a highway cutting through a landscape, with lights and signs so bright that they obscure any other possible paths. 

We think we have to get on the highway, because it’s the only path to…happiness? Love? Security? Looking for love, care, and security is vulnerable, and we live in a world that thinks it’s fun to make these things scarce. To make us believe that we have to lock them down in order to keep them.

Instead of taking the faint dirt path through the trees, it’s safer to just get on the highway, where you know for sure where you’re going. Someone has promised you there’s a town ahead, and they’ve given you a super easy to read map. (Sometimes the highway dumps you right off the freeway, and the town was just a desert mirage, but that’s a topic for another day). 

When we don’t have any guarantees that getting off the highway is safe, being on the highway is a great choice. It just comes at a cost. 

I think we suffer when we try to fit our relationships into someone else’s forms. Contorting ourselves to fit into something that’s not the right size is an uncomfortable experience. We end up talking with a lot of “shoulds”, a lot of shame, a lot of judgment of ourselves and others. And we lose access to our inner sense of what feels good and what works for us when we are always looking outside ourselves to know what’s good or bad. Our personal navigation systems start to atrophy.

I want to make it easier for people to get off the highway. I want to start building exits off the highway, and tell more stories about the forest, so that people know it isn’t so scary. The more people who start walking through the forest, the less scary it gets. Maybe you find out that there’s a group walking the way you think you want to go, and you camp with them until you’re tugged in a different direction. You share stories over the campfire about where you’ve been.

I also want to change how we navigate the road. Instead of using directions and signs that other people made, and tearing down trees to create the easiest path from A to B, can we learn to work with the landscape? A highway doesn’t change; a forest does. As our world changes, can we keep adjusting and finding new forms and paths that work better for each different moment? A forest is responsive; a highway is not. A path is something that we can be in relationship with. Instead of learning from the highway that there’s one path, one way that doesn’t change, one way that is safe, can we learn from the forest?

Eventually, in my dreams, the highway gets retaken by the landscape. Without the constant stream of cars, vines start to break through the concrete, and the guardrails become homes for squirrels. 

Someday, someone walks the same path that the highway used to be on–walks it through their own guidance–without ever knowing the highway used to be there.