Sentinals in the Night

The freeway was mostly empty of cars last night as I drove home from work. By midnight, most people have enough sense to be off the roads and at home in bed. As I proceeded home, I had driven past that stretch of the parkway with a lot of businesses on either side of the road and the only illumination came from my headlights and from the freeway lighting mounted on the towering poles in the center of the road. The lights were mounted in pairs, each light facing out toward either side of the road. The pairs of lights stood like sentinels, one pair after another stretching out ahead of me. The yellowish points of light snaked out into the night, sometimes rising, sometimes falling. These sentinels lit my way ahead, undulating to the left and right and then straightening out for a stretch of road. The road would dogleg to the left again or to the right perhaps. I had a sure sense of where the road would go just ahead and I could mentally note that I would need to turn just a bit to the left or right in about a minute. These sentinels were my unwavering guides to what lay just ahead and they marked the way home through the darkness that covered the land on either side of the road.

Sometimes I try to look into the future to glean some sense of where I am headed and what life has in store for me. There are no such sentinels lighting the road ahead in this case… only unbroken darkness which stretches infinitely on into the mists of time. As I move forward, one minute at time, I am able to see where I am today, at this moment. However, even the minute just ahead is just as much an unknown quantity as the minute a week or a year into the future. I am forced to simply use my accumulated knowledge and wisdom, my instincts and my intuition as I move forward in my life. The future remains a constant, unfathomable unknown.

There have certainly been moments in my life when I would have truly welcomed the procession of solemn pairs of sentinels lighting the way ahead as I was moving from one moment to the next. Had they been there to mark the path ahead, I might not have made so many wrong turns along the way. Perhaps my journey might have taken me in a very different direction. In truth, my life has not turned out badly for me. But it is only human to look back and feel some regret at having wasted as much precious time allotted to me as I did.