We are a pitiful lot, aren’t we? We look around and see things we want. We want that car he has, or the job she has, and don’t forget the hair she has, but then you can buy that. That’s just the beginning of the wants. Can you imagine if there were a true Want Ads section of a newspaper?

I am about to do something that will help make me a successful and happy man. This something that a small percentage of humanity will do in order to reach that pinnacle of life. I am going to begin a journey.

This isn’t a journey to Disney World or the Grand Canyon, although for some, that may be the journey chosen. No, this journey, this Route of Life starts at my current existence and choosing my chosen point of happiness and success, making decisions along the way to make it all come true, before parking my Ferrari Portofino at the final Exit of Life.

You are thinking that we all do this every day of our lives. That’s not true. You see, we all have this GPS of Life we start out with at birth. Point A is the day we are born. Point B is when we should start making decisions about our future, and Point C is the end.

Point A you can’t control, you’re strapped in your car seat in the self-driving car that carries you through life and head to Point B. Most of us, when we turn 14 or so, the Age of Decision Making, move from the back seat to the passenger seat for a better view, just so we can see things we want. You are delivered to your high school advisor and she asks what classes you want to take, what school sports or activities you want to be in, and what are your plans for after graduation. You push the well-worn button number one, then as the window of your car rises, you fall in line behind your best friend and the other lemmings.

You enter Point C, the Exit of Life, into the GPS of Life with adequate restrooms available along the way and the trip continues. The car of your life drives along and when obstacles appear, it picks the easiest way around that obstacle and continues along the way with no side trips or new point C in your trip. All easy and simple.

You graduate high school. Sadly for you, your best friend is accepted to a college out of state because she made decisions you didn’t know about. You enter the college nearest to home. While you get your Business or Education degree you meet someone, because that is the GPS of Life’s most used route from your point B. You stare wide-eyed like a deer caught in blue tinted halogen headlights as you walk down the aisle because you are supposed to do that after you graduate college, even though you aren’t certain that you even have feelings of like, let alone love, for your future spouse.

Now you are at least happy your high school advisor suggested you enter the “adequate restrooms” into the GPS of Life, because if you are a man, you have married a woman, who at one time drank five margaritas and three shots of something that was never identified and danced for three hours without stopping, whose bladder has now suddenly become the size of a raisin or if you are a woman, you need to get warm because your husband doesn’t understand that normal humans need to use heaters during winter, not air conditioners, which means you need coffee every 30 minutes, and of course that means you need to pee, and the cycle continues. And let us not mention what happens once the children come along. And the dog. The incontinent dog that your wife just won’t allow you to put to sleep although it can’t walk or even poop without you helping it stand, and you sometimes have need to poke the poor thing to start its breathing again. Try to look cool in that grassy area at the convenience store holding up the back end of a Boxer so it can poop. That’s the Success Life of Happiness.

I think you probably see what the GPS of Life is all about. You are simply a passenger that makes the stops and visits the places between points B and C that are most common for people in your general area and demographic, which your high school advisor helpfully programmed in for you at Point B, the Age of Decision Making.

That describes a very large percentage of the world. For some, they can’t get off that GPS of Life route. They are born in to a world where there are very few stops between Point A and Point C, and there is no Age of Decision Making. But for people that are reading this, very likely you can reroute. And thank God, Oprah or BTS for that.

For me, a journey is a series of decisions you make. The first decision is often the hardest decision to make but it is the one that frees you. It could be you quitting a job to start your own business while you have no guarantee of success or income for the next month or six. It could be moving thousands of miles away from everyone and everything you know. It could be a change of your current family life package.

One piece of advice at this point, an aside if you will, tell your doctor about your beginning a journey, because it is very likely your blood pressure will be rising at first due to stress, unless your rerouting is a fabulous opportunity with nothing to leave behind. For the rest of us, read me, you don’t want to get misdiagnosed and end up doing a nuclear stress test.

People that can sit down, analyze their life and then say they are truly happy are those who have taken journeys and achieved success. You need to define what your success will be. For me, that journey is beginning late in life. But, is it ever too late to become happy? Is a person ever too old or too far along the GPS of Life route to swerve in to that next exit, take a deep breathe, and reroute?

By this time next year, I should be at a Point C in life, that new Starting/Current Life point working on a Point D, Success and Happiness. No one make any assumptions about what that C is. I am an odd one and it could be anything. I am the amnesiac who wrote an historical fiction novel about pirates and met a blogging friend from Australia, who was born in Malaysia to Chinese parents, at a Cracker Barrel in Georgia for breakfast and introduced her to grits for the first time in her life. In my life, anything can happen. And I want anything to happen. I am going to have fun until that Point E, the Exit of Life, comes along. Bring it on world, I got your GPS right here.