Desire Lines (and other shower thoughts)

On curiosity, neurodivergence, and the strange little paths that somehow became a life.

I woke up this morning with so many stories and thoughts clamouring for attention.

I’ve spent the last couple of days recreating my website and posting some of my essays and writings and thoughts into my new library. And as I got ready for my morning, I stepped into the shower knowing the shower thoughts were going to come.

Fast. Furious. Tumbling over each other like a river.

And they did.

Today’s thoughts were about maps and curiosity and some of my favourite quotes when I was younger.

Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

And:

Not all those who wander are lost.

Simultaneously, I’m thinking about the trip I have coming up. I haven’t packed. I have so many things still to gather. I’m leaving in a few days.

And yet my brain will not stop coming up with stories for you.

Stories for me.

Stories for us.

So here I am, standing under the water, thinking thoughts and writing things in my brain that usually never have a place to go.

Except now they do.

And now they want to be on the page.

Now.

Now.

NOW.

But I have a life. And I have things to do.

It’s funny. My kids have been telling me for years, “Mom, I think you might have a touch of the ‘tism.”

Being a kid who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, I didn’t even really understand what that was. We had very rigid definitions of what things like ADHD and autism looked like.

We didn’t even call it neurodivergence back then.

My own children grew up in a different education system, with different language and different ways of recognizing brains that work differently. And eventually they started looking at me and saying, essentially:

Mom. Have you considered that this might be you?

ADHD entered the conversation.

Eventually autism did too.

Neither is a diagnosis I’ve gone looking for. They are, at this point, more like working theories offered by my children and some of the people closest to me who actually have to live with me.

And being the curious creature that I am, of course I looked them up.

Of course I started assembling the dossier.

Evidence for.

Evidence against.

Competing explanations.

Old memories pulled out of storage and examined under different lighting.

Because we are all not one thing.

We are many things.

And yet I’m beginning to wonder whether these things, in particular, might be true about me.

And if they are, they offer an interesting kind of map.

Not necessarily one that tells me where I’m supposed to go.

Maybe one that lets me look backward at territory I’ve already crossed and say:

Oh.

Is that what that was?

Because this is actually how a lot of my writing starts.

Something catches.

A curiosity about myself. A mystery. An unsolved question. Something lands with just enough resonance that it grabs my brain and will not shake loose until I’ve followed it far enough to formulate some kind of educated opinion about it.

Which is simultaneously absolutely joyfully fulfilling and utterly irritatingly aggravating.

Because sometimes the paths my feet want to travel look less like a nice orderly map and more like that old Family Circus cartoon showing Billy’s route through the neighbourhood.

Back and forth.

Around the tree.

Across the street.

Behind somebody’s house.

Over here.

Back there.

Criss-crossing the neighbourhood until the whole thing looks like a chaos of scribbles.

Desire lines.

Those unofficial paths created because, regardless of where somebody decided the sidewalk ought to go, feet keep wanting to travel somewhere else.

Desire lines. Or possibly just a map of my brain.

I think I’ve been following them my entire life.

Which might explain a few things.

You may have met me when I was a human resources consultant.

You may have met me when I was a librarian, way back in high school and early adulthood.

You may have met me when I was facilitating team-building games for large companies of adults in serious organizations.

You may have met me as a volunteer docent when I brought Jenny, the one-winged owl, into your classroom as part of an educational program I was presenting for an international zoo.

(Yes, she was a real, live creature.)

(Yes, I helped train her. I was an owl handler AND docent.)

One of my many cool titles in this lifetime.

You may have met me simply as a mom and never known I did any of these things.

You may have met me in my studio, Da Vinci’s Attic, where I encouraged creativity and exploration and the following of those creative urges to see where they might lead.

You may have met me as a healer, through one of the many modalities I’ve picked up over the years.

You may have met me as a coach.

An accountability partner in business.

A Girl Guide leader (or a Girl Guide, depending on how far back in time we go).

An oracle card maker and reader.

At one point, my curiosity even wandered into the Akashic Records because someone told me there was a mysterious metaphysical library and my brain went, Wait. A library? Tell me more.

Apparently once a library kid, always a library kid.

Even if the library is something ethereal and hard to understand, but oh so satisfying to poke around in.

Looking backward, I can see how all of this might look like someone who couldn’t figure out what she wanted to be.

Sometimes I’ve wondered that myself.

But from here, it looks different.

There is a path.

It just isn’t straight.

Something catches my attention and I follow it.

I poke around.

I gather evidence.

I ask questions.

I find connections between things that supposedly don’t belong together.

I argue with myself.

I change my mind.

I disappear behind somebody’s metaphorical house because apparently there was something interesting over there.

And eventually I come back carrying something.

A story.

A question.

An idea.

Another way of seeing something I thought I already understood.

Which brings me back to that quote I was thinking about in the shower:

Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Part of me LOVES that.

Yes.

Exactly.

Go where there is no path.

Except almost immediately another part of my brain chimes in and says:

No. Leaving trails is bad.

Because I am a nature girl at heart.

Stay on the designated trail.

Leave no trace.

Please do not trample the fragile ecosystem in pursuit of your metaphor.

Apparently even my inspirational quotes have to get past the Thought Police.

Maybe I’m not here to leave a trail anyway.

Maybe I’m leaving field notes.

Little records from the places my curiosity has taken me.

I came this way.

Here’s what I noticed.

Make of it what you will.

Maybe that’s what this library is becoming.

Not a perfectly organized account of everything I know.

Not proof that all these strange turns were secretly leading toward one predetermined destination (or an offer).

Just the accumulated traces of questions I couldn’t leave alone.

A map of my desire lines.

And sometimes that map might look like wisdom.

Sometimes it might look like Billy wandered through the entire neighbourhood before remembering he was supposed to come home for lunch.

Both can be true.

Desire lines, my friend.

They rule the world.

At least my world.

And definitely this morning.

But hold that thought, because I gotta go pack. I’ve got a plane to catch.

I’m off on an adventure soon.

And adventures are the stuff of life.