When I was a child, my father was the type of man who always had passing fancies. He seemed a bit restless and
never quite knew what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he was in his late 30s at this time.

I suppose I can’t really say much about that, because I really didn’t begin doing what I wanted to do with my life until I was 33 years old myself.

The legal type people say we are adults at 18, but I have to say, at 18, I really didn’t have a clue who, what, or even why I wanted to be—anything. I was probably about 25 years old before I really began the process of becoming… well, me. Anyway, my father dabbled in a lot of things: karate, flying, ballroom dancing, gun collecting, medicine, and that’s just to name a few. The one that really stands out to me though was photography.

Photography: the ability to take a moment in time and freeze it on a small, flat sheet to be viewed at a later time—a
tangible memory.

There was a photo contest in some magazine that my father sent an entry to. To this day, I have a copy of this black and white photograph in an album on my bookshelf.

The picture he took was of a sign. The sign was posted in a public playground park, made of metal, was about two feet long and one foot high, but was posted on two metal stands, imbedded in the ground with concrete. Or at least, it had been imbedded in the ground.

The sign had been knocked over, the metal posts bent, some of the concrete cracked and was sticking up out of the
ground, and there was a broken beer bottle and some ketchup packages lying next to the sign. On the face of the
sign, the photograph clearly showed spray-painted graffiti. Now, perhaps none of this means much to you, after all,
there are probably hundreds of signs that have been knocked over and run down or graffiti’ed every day, right?

What really sticks out to me about this sign was what the sign said:

Warning: It is a violation of city ordinance 104.7
of the parks and recreation code to litter, vandalize,
or otherwise deface or destroy public property.
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED

I think the photograph made a poignant statement, don’t you?

We see a lot of signs in the world. Many of them are quite clear and others are more obscure.

A stop sign is pretty clear. It’s red, so it’s easy to see. It’s big, so you don’t miss it. It has reflective paint on it, so it appears to illuminate at night. Its instructions are also pretty clear:

STOP

Hard not to know what to do with that sign, isn’t it? You…well, you stop, right?

When my daughter had received her learner’s permit, the first thing she wanted to do was drive. She didn’t want to
read the book first and learn the rules; all she could think about was getting behind the wheel of that car, as well as
the freedom driving was going to offer her.

We did parent-taught driver’s education, which meant I was the, ahem, lucky one who got to teach my daughter to drive. We went through the precautionary checklists, mirrors, seatbelts, etc, and then she pulled out of the driveway for the first time, hands on the wheel in the exact proper positions, and straightened the car and drove two blocks down the street.

We came to a stop sign at this point, and she did exactly what the sign told her. She stopped.

And there we sat, stopped at the stop sign…and we sat, and sat, and sat… and while we are sitting there, I hear her quiet, embarrassed voice ask, “How do I know when to go?” I have to laugh at the simplicity of her question. She followed the instructions. She read the sign, and she stopped. Yet, the sign didn’t tell her how she was supposed to know when to go again.

What was such a simple thing to me that I just knew, and I assumed others, like my daughter, would also know, was not so simple to her.

“How do I know when to go?”

We live our lives from day to day, and there are signs there for us too. I’m not talking about the physical signs, like a stop sign, or a billboard, or a street sign, but rather, the more metaphoric signs, the things that happen that, if we are paying attention, will tell us what to expect next.

If our spouse is acting crabby all day long, we can take that as an unspoken sign that now is probably not the best time to discuss something of great significance.

If our child is being hyper and will not sit still and keep his hands off of things, we can take that as a sign that perhaps today is not the best day to go to shopping at the mall with him.

If we pay attention, we are given signs, all the time, of the things we can expect to happen in the future. Sometimes
those signs are clear – STOP – and we know what to do, but for some of us, we find ourselves asking, “Okay, now when am I supposed to go?”

When an event happens in your life, and you find you’ve been spun around, and everything has come to a stop—do
you know when you are supposed to go?

Much like I told my daughter that day in car, “It depends.” Sometimes, you can look in all directions and proceed with caution and just go. Other times, you may have to inch up, a little at a time, until you can get a clear view of the direction you want to move, and then you can, slowly, move forward, when it is safe to do so.

There may come a time when your path is blocked in front of you and to either side and the only thing you can do is throw it into reverse and move back the way you came, turning around when it is safe to turn, and move in a different direction, taking a different street.

The one thing you cannot do is stay stopped. You simply cannot sit at the stop sign and never move. You have to
make a choice and follow it through.

When you come to a stop in your life, allow yourself a moment to actually stop. Don’t roll through the stop signs of
your life without taking the time to stop for a moment, then look around, make sure it is safe and then, this is most
important, give yourself permission to go.