What if...

One of the rewards of a long car trip is the time to muse. Especially as you travel through the deserts and wasteland that make up the Great Southwest of the United States. You can go for hours at a time on "autopilot" freeing your mind to travel where it will.

And my mind loves to travel. It usually starts out imagining what it would be like to be a lone figure on a horse wending his way westward. Living on whatever game was to be had, sleeping on hard ground with only a blanket or two for comfort, at the mercy of the elements. You make a fire by whatever means you have at hand; the matches you had either depleted or made useless by the rainstorms you've encountered. Your only companion is your horse. That horse is not only your transportation, it's your link to survival. After a few days, you begin to smell alike. So alike, you no longer notice.

I imagine all this while riding in air-conditioned comfort at speeds no horse could reach, on roads smooth and safe. No working your way up and down hills and gullies, no walking for miles to give the horse a rest. I sip from a plastic bottle kept cold in an insulated bag while my alter-ego searches for a watering hole full of muddy, maybe unsafe, water.

A motorcyclist or two ride by in the other direction and my mind jumps ahead to 1969 when I contemplated riding back to Florida from Los Angeles on my BSA. I fantasize about the adventures I might have had, the people I might have met, the jobs along the way I might have taken to pay for gas and the occasional lodging. A part of me regrets not doing it. Who would I be today if I had taken that road then?

Would I have ended up at the phone company? Would I have married and had a bunch of kids? Would I have gone to college and become a lawyer (an old dream)?

I put off that trip back then because I couldn't make the decision to go. I was adrift. I had just spent 4 years going where someone else, some unknown and unseen person, ordered my ship to go. I wasn't used to making such decisions. And maybe I just was afraid to commit to something, to anything. I was comfortable, I was getting by, my life was "on hold."

We make these little choices in our lives and we profit, or lose, by them for the rest of our lives. Some of us wonder "what if..."