Which way to the Twilight Zone?

I'm living in a Twilight Zone, and I didn't even know it. It's crazy how you can live your life thinking that your daily decisions affect only you. Actually, each decision you make can affect your friends and family, too. What I find really interesting, is how you can make a decision and not see its full effect for years... Maybe even decades. And by then, the effects are rippled through family, friends, and even out to strangers.

That is the Twilight Zone that I am living in. I'm feeling the ripples from past decisions. It's not necessarily a bad feeling--those ripples that cause the surface of my life to undulate--but it's certainly unexpected. And I'm not entirely without fault in disrupting the calm surface of our (my family's) existence. It was one of my own past actions that brought this most recent incident to fruition. It was a seemingly small thing... And long forgotten...

I think of myself as a planner. I like to know where I'm going, and how I can best get there. I Google maps. I MapQuest directions. I test alternate routes... But in the end, you can't always predict every eventuality. Tires go flat. Engines overheat. Sometimes, despite your best planning, you simply take a wrong turn and get lost. But have you ever noticed? Sometimes, those moments of misdirected effort take you somewhere better than where you were planning to go. I'm hoping that's where I've just found myself.

I didn't plan this trip. I don't know the details of the events that have brought me here. I'm hoping that there is a happy ending to my own personal episode of the Twilight Zone. But if you see me stranded along the side of the road--throw me a map, preferably one that includes directions back to normal life. And just maybe I'll be bringing someone back with me to share the ride.