Road Block

Road Block

A young peasant woman set out gaily on a journey. Some in her family had told her to watch for a large boulder on the path she would travel. When she saw it, from a distance, the boulder did look large but certainly not unmanageable. Curiously, it also did not look that close to the road. However, continuing her upward and rocky journey the middle-aged peasant woman found that the boulder was indeed very large, and had completely blocked the road.  

Obviously, many had tried to move it off of the road. Old, rusty tools damaged by time, weather and animals, were strewn around it. Dents, cracks, and holes in the rock showed numerous attempts to make smaller this huge boulder barring the roadway wending it’s way through hills, valleys, forests and plains. Chunks and pieces of rock piled here and there were a testament to those that had taken up the task of moving an immovable object. Grass and vines grew all around and through it.

Sadly, the skeleton of the last man to try moving the chiseled and hammered rock lay against the smooth trunk of a willow tree. The willow tree, once young and slender was now old and wise and clothed in beautiful lacy branches, slender leaves draping to the ground. The unfortunate gentleman beneath its arched branches now wore only thread bare rags, grayed and dusty from age and weather. A worn, faded basket and a long empty wine bottle lay by his side, one boney hand draped over them.

The peasant woman looked with sadness upon the entire scene. The woman, once young and fair, had traveled far to be stopped so suddenly. Her journey had made her old, but she was still vigorous and strong. Shrugging her shoulders she walked slowly around the rock to see if her journey had come to it's end. Where the rock had once blocked this well traveled road, many traveler’s had gone ‘round the left and some ‘round the right, making two roads to follow.

Seeing new roads to travel around the boulder, she smiled and said "I do think it's time for lunch."

After a lunch of bread and cheese, cold water from a babbling brook, she took a short rest, her head against the boulder, the sun on her face. Then shouldering her pack and taking the left fork in the road, she continued her journey.  

"Determination gives you the resolve to keep going

in spite of the roadblocks that lay before you."

~ Denis Waitley