Flowing | New Mexico, USA| Feb 2009

A comment by Erica Johansson on the photo “Decisions” from last week:

Left or right. How can one know which way to choose? … Before I’ve often thought that, when you are faced with different choices, there’s only one right decision and the rest of them are all wrong. Sometimes I was even kinda scared to make the wrong decision. I’m happy I’ve learnt that one decision isn’t necessarily more right than the others, they just have different outcomes.

Yesterday I was faced with a very simple but day-defining decision: where exactly should I go? And which route should I take to get there?

We make plans in the evening, we fill our heads with ideas on what to do the next day, but if we listen to our guts in the morning we’ll know the right course. Our minds and bodies are good at sifting through ideas and half-made decisions through the evening, we just need to listen to ourselves a little more intently to pick up on our keen senses.

So when I started the car in the morning, the choice was obvious, and I made the turn to the south, spending the day flowing through the vast emptiness of the New Mexico highlands.

Some might say the lack of scenery makes for a boring drive, and while I often agree, yesterday it put me into a blissful trance, running down two-lane roads cutting through the rolling hills with the wind at my back, dodging tumbleweeds and complete thoughts with equal success.

Dead towns, endless trains, power lines stretching off into the horizon; pauses to rest at intermittent pull-offs, locations seemingly selected by nothing more than the road-builder’s whim; road junctions between nowhere and anywhere.

A funk removed, an escape, an open road, open mind and an open soul.

A good day.