Following The ‘Right’ Path

I went for a beautiful hike in the mountains behind where we live in Spain.  It was a lovely spring day – even though it was only February the weather had a spring like feel to it.  The sun was shining and there were a few fluffy clouds in the blue sky. We had set off to do a new hike near the village nearby.  My friend done one in the same area a few weeks before and had found it to be very well signposted, somewhat unusual for Spain.  We got the village and found a sign with a map of the route – so far so good.  Problem was there was no ‘you are here’ on the map!  So we took an educated guess and headed off in what we thought was the general direction of where we needed to go.

After a while we encountered a Spanish man and asked him where the route started and he said to walk back up the mountain road for quite a long way and look for a track by a boat!  Odd directions you may think in the mountain, we certainly did. We decided that he may not be the best of signposts to listen to and that we’d take the track off to our right anyway and just go and explore.

Sure in the knowledge that we were nowhere near the hike we had intended to do we had a great time and after a while of following the tracked decided to go ‘off piste’ and follow some terraces on the hill to create a circular route – we always prefer that to turning round. A few goat tracks and sliding down terraces later we managed to meet a second track going in the right direction and headed back towards the village.

All in all a great hike even though it was not the one we planned

We then decided to drive around to see if we could find the right for another day.  As we neared the road we noticed a sign and looking at it we saw that the track we had taken was the right one all along.  Not only that, if we had just stayed on it rather than going ‘off piste’, we would have arrived at the destination – the peak – and completed the round.  To top it all as we drove back home we passed the boat and true to the Spaniard’s words there was indeed another track to the left again signposted with the route we had wanted to take.

As we laughed about our foolishness we asked ourselves what allegories with life does this hold?

1. That often if you follow your instinct you can be on the right path even when you don’t have confirmation of it.  How often do we get that gut feeling and then not give it long enough to check whether we were right.  How quickly do we doubt ourselves in life?
2. When you are on a good path don’t go ‘off piste’ but follow it through – it just might take you where you want to go.  Sure the goat’s track was fun but it was not easy – we made things difficult for ourselves.  How often do we do that in life?  If a route is worth following – it is worth following through.
3. Once we had decided that we were on the wrong route but just exploring anyway that decision meant that we did not even look out for signs.  We actually walked past the sign that would have told us we were in the right track very early on the walk.  But our ‘knowing’ that we weren’t on the right track blinkered our eyes.  We had walked straight past it.  How often in life do we make assumptions and not see the signs.  The things that would help us along in our journey?I see that I do all these things and I think we are all guilty of them at some point or other.  I just love how all our life experience can teach us if we are willing to ask the questions.  We were just having fun with our ‘mistake’ on the way home and came up with these three insights.

What is your life showing you right now?  Maybe this story has resonated with you, or maybe you are wondering about things that are happening right now in your life.  If you feel you’d like some help deciphering your life’s journey then let have a chat.  You can email me or give me a call on +44 (0)203 239 6155