" 'Right. Any idea why Seese is sending us hundreds of miles off our route to see him?'
" 'Do we had a route?' Rinpoche asked.
"I drove slowly along the wide main street, looking for a person of whom I might inquire and thinking that if I could just settle my mind a bit more I would come to understand that everything my brother-in-law said was a lesson. Everything he said, everything he did, simply his way of being on this earth – all of it was a lesson worth more than a new a summer house or a million-dollar annuity. Do we had a route? No, we did not have a route. Of course we didn't. But my mind, the habitual pattern of my thoughts, felt the need to rope the future into a corral. I lacked the courage to live out my life minute by minute. I needed a route, a plan, a future that was predictable – or at least imaginable – and safe, even though one second's glance at my almost fifty-two-year past would prove that no such future could ever possibly exist. Do we had a route? It wasn't said in a critical way. He wasn't mocking or judging, only showing me, with a kind, automatic straightforwardness, that no, we did not have a route, not in Mullen and not in life. It came clear to me then that, looked at with my ordinary mind, the trip seemed pointless, a wild goose chase of the first order, a colossal waste of time. But one step backward into clarity and it was all clearly intentional: I was being asked to give up the crutch of having a plan. I was being offered the chance to do what I might have done in my late teens or early twenties – just go, trust the road, see what lessons it offered, take my lumps, and savor the joys. I spotted a young woman pushing a stroller in front of a place called Red's, and I stopped the car and got out, feeling as if my mind had been knocked into an open pasture. Do we had a route?"
