You Thought You Were Going to Boston

My son always loved trains.

Seriously loved them.

For a while I thought he might become a real-life engineer—I pictured him shoveling coal into a firebox, fueling steam locomotives.

But then I reminded myself we don’t power trains that way anymore.

We had more Thomas the Tank Engine sets, wooden tracks, and train movies than one child should reasonably have. He would stay immersed in that world for hours. I remember dropping him off at my parents’ house once—when he was just 18 months old—before my hour-long commute to the city. Within two minutes of arriving, he was on the rug, deep in his train set. I called out, “Duncan, Mommy has to go to work…” expecting tears, outstretched arms, the whole thing.

But he looked up, waved, and went back to connecting puzzle pieces of track.

Duncan is now 28, and the train obsession, sadly, has passed.

I asked him once why he used to love trains so much. And without a moment's hesitation he said,

“They can only go in one direction. And I always knew where they were going.”

Ahhh. Directional certainty.

Wouldn’t it be nice if life worked that way?

It would be lovely if we always knew where we were headed, and we could count on what it was going to look like going forward.

But life instead tends to be a squiggly, hilly, sometimes painful, two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of journey.

Duncan pointed out something else too: Sometimes, someone else switches the track on you. You’re chugging along just fine, and someone in some mysterious office leans on a giant lever—and bam. Suddenly, you’re on your way to Arkansas. And you’re asking yourself what the heck happened when you thought you were going to Boston.

Have you ever found yourself on a track that had a sudden turn? One you would never have chosen and can’t change?

Or do you ever wish you could reverse your train, but there’s no going back?

Now that Duncan is an adult, I often long to roll our family train backwards. I want to go back to when he was four years old, wearing an engineer’s hat and carrying a wooden whistle. I want to go back to those times when I tied his shoes and he needed me to cook him dinner and tell him exactly how to navigate the world.

But life cruelly moves in one direction.

That said, Duncan did share one more thing about why he loved trains so much in that conversation.

He said, “I loved bringing my own creativity to it. I got to design my own path.”

Life gives us that opportunity, doesn’t it?

If we are lucky enough, we get to imagine the village we want to be in. We get to create our train one car at a time. We have choice in what tracks we choose to follow—and we get to choose which cars we hitch ourselves to.

What track are you on right now exactly?

Where did you think you were headed, and is that where you are going?

Finally, if you could install a turnout right now—that rail that allows a train to move from one track to another—what would you be switching up?

These are not small questions.

But if you ask them, it means you’re already standing at an intersection.

And this is exactly where the interesting part begins.

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