A few weeks ago, on a Friday, I began a labyrinthine journey without knowing it. Fridays are my weekly days off, and I sometimes stay at home all day, reading, playing video games, doing a few chores. On other Fridays, I get itchy to travel, and I get in my car and just go somewhere. Some days that leads me to labyrinths. Other days it leads me back to some place I used to live. Other days I just drive for a while with no particular destination.

On this particular Friday, I took a three-hour drive into New York State to check out the college my 11^th-grade son is currently enamored with. I thought I might as well take a look, see what the place looks like, and maybe hit a few labyrinths nearby while I’m there.

It was a pleasant enough visit. The school didn’t really strike me one way or the other. I got a few photos and texted them to my family. Then I drove around the city the college is in. At first I intended to find a labyrinth or two, but when I couldn’t find parking, I just decided to keep moving – after all, there’s a decent chance I’ll be driving here again many times in the next few years.

I have spent so much time driving into my own past, visiting the place I was baptized, the place I grew up, the last church I served, and more. I’ve written about some of these trips on this blog before, and they were so powerful for me. This trip felt so different, because it was about the future, or at least a potential future. Not that it was my future, but my child’s future. It felt like peeking behind the veil of uncertainty that is time.

I grabbed a quick bite to eat at a mini-mart, and started driving home. My intention was to stop on the way for a labyrinth near Binghamton. As I approached Binghamton, I noticed a number of police cars stopped at the side of the road, for traffic stops. I had noticed this in the same area as I drove up that morning. I filed this away as some helpful information for the future: don’t speed on Interstate 81 near Binghamton.

But then I noticed flashing lights right behind me. I looked at my speedometer – I wasn’t speeding. So I pulled off the road, praying that the police car would drive past. But it didn’t. It pulled off right behind me. Great.

I’ll spare you the details of the conversation between the state trooper and me. But the upshot was this: I had driven past the parked police cars a mile back without shifting lanes. And apparently that is illegal in New York – by law, you must move to the left lane when passing an emergency vehicle. He wrote me a ticket, and I drove away, feeling absolutely miserable.

Looking back now, I can frame what happened this way: I know that it’s a good idea to move over when emergency vehicles are pulled over, but it seemed to me at the time that the lanes were wide enough that I was safe staying in my lane. I had no idea that it was a law. I made a mistake, but it’s hardly a moral failure. In fact, it’s good that I now know it’s the law. (I’ve since learned that my home state of Pennsylvania also passed a similar “Move-Over Law” in 2020.) I can view the fine I paid as the cost of learning that, which might save a life in the future!

That’s how I see it now. But the hour it happened? No. That’s not how I saw it at all. I wanted to curl up in a ball and just die. I felt guilty. I had been selfish and thoughtless, and I had put lives at risk through my selfishness. I thought about how I was teaching my son to drive, and I felt like I was incapable of that. How could I teach someone to drive when I was a criminal driver myself? I was a failure. A failure as a father, a failure as a person. The Dark Voice was loud. The Dark Voice was strong. The Dark Voice was in command.

I just kept driving, heading home, distraught that I had so many miles yet to go. I decided to embrace the misery, as I have so many times before. I turned on Spotify, and put on a playlist that was a collection of music that I always used to listen to while depressed, the kind of music that kept me depressed, that allowed the world around me to sound like the world within, a rhythm of guilty melancholy to resound in my head.

And I was surprised by what happened. As I listened to Peter Gabriel and Barenaked Ladies and Primitive Radio Gods, I found myself feeling and thinking things I didn’t expect. I found myself connecting with all the other times I’d listened to this mix, all the other times I’d felt depressed and guilty, and I realized: This feeling is not about what just happened at the side of the road. That was just a trigger. This feeling is the old record I play over and over and over again. This is predictable. This is perennial. This is just a part of who I am. And I don’t have to keep feeling this way.

The lyrics that had so often held me tight in remorseful anguish were now offering me a way out. It was as though I had unleashed my own Pandora’s Box of guilt yet again, and only now did I finally see, in the bottom of the box, the final gift: hope.

I didn’t have to feel this way. I could change this.

And slowly, as I crossed the border back into Pennsylvania, that hope began to drip, drop by drop, into my mind. Slowly, the ripples of those drops changed the trajectory of my thoughts, altered the hue of my emotions, and began to calm my heart.

I was well past Binghamton by now, well into Pennsylvania. But I knew there was one more labyrinth on the way, a labyrinth I’d never walked before. I wanted to go there, and find out more about what was happening in my mind, see where this might take me.

This journey was supposed to be about the future. Could this be the future of my perennial guilt?

And that’s a story for the next post.