Hello, Handbasket!

Today I find myself concerned because I have stopped for a second, looked around and realized I'm sitting in a handbasket.  Yes, this is a metaphor.  And when you are sitting in a metaphorical handbasket you know what your ultimate destination is going to be.  If you don't, I applaud you and I would appreciate life advice.

Now, in the moment of inevitable re-evaluation that this sort of handbasket sitting causes, I thought about how I had arrived in the center of this particular handbasket.  Life has a strange way of wending around like a lazy river.  It takes its own time, bending here and swirling there.  Moving in a muddled way that can take a distracted traveler by surprise.  One moment you've put into the river in a canoe, knowing exactly what direction you are headed.  The next while you take a moment to admire the scenery, you realize that you are suddenly in the eddy of an oxbow facing entirely the opposite direction from the one you expected and your canoe has magically turned itself into a handbasket.

At moments like this, I like to assess my life and try to figure out which bend in the river has put me in this precise handbasket.  So, I looked around at a few of my fellow travelers.  A few of them looked shocked as though they'd been newly apprised of our destination.  A couple of them looked grim as though they'd known about our dire situation for a long time but seen no way out of the inevitable.  Not a one of us was entirely sure how the river of life had turned us around and spit us out into this handbasket on the highway to... well, you know.

Hindsight has proven the few souls that bailed earlier to be the wiser travelers on this path.  Alas, I was not so wise as they.  I have only now seen the handwriting on the road signs.  So here we are, a sad group of somewhat more or less shocked travelers in a handbasket speeding down the highway.  I gape as we roar past another group of people along the side of the road feverishly bent over their wickerwork; weaving a new handbasket for their own impending journey.  That's when I realized that not a single fellow traveler was arguing about whether we were, in fact, on our way to H*ll with impressive speed, we were merely quibbling about the ETA.

The way things have gone today, I think it might be wise to invest in wicker.