I was driving on I-95 northbound in Virginia a couple of weeks ago, midmorning on a weekday. As you might expect, the traffic was fairly light. Plenty of cars, but we were moving well above the speed limit. 

But southbound I-95 was a different story. They were barely crawling. I’m not sure why the traffic was so bad, although anyone who’s ever traveled I-95 knows it happens all the time whether there’s a good reason or not. I-95 is a busy, busy highway. 

The situation struck me as a great analogy for how we travel our own paths in life, and how we have to let others travel theirs. We often think we know how another’s journey should unfold. Or at least, what they should do in order to have a better life experience.

“He should exercise more. She needs to stop spending so much time with those friends of hers. If only he’d try meditating.”

Parents are especially guilty of this. After all, we’ve been there, done that. We know what could happen. But perhaps what we wish to help our kids avoid is exactly what they came here to experience. 

From the human viewpoint, this is hard to fathom. When we see someone suffering, we feel bad for them. If we’re close to them, we want to try to help them, to fix it for them. 

That often means trying to get them to do what we think they should do. Encouraging or demanding that they travel life’s roads as we would, to make their lives easier, or better. But souls don’t incarnate in order to have lives devoid of challenges. That would be like going to school, but not being asked to do anything hard – like learn. What would be the point? 

Souls come for the growth, the experience, the challenge. And more, of course. The good stuff, too, like love, joy, laughter. But often we only reach the good stuff by going through the challenges put in front of us. Think of a veterinarian and all of the challenges and hard work she puts in before she’s able to open her clinic to the non-human patients she adores. Or the lonely parent who loses a child and finds a loving community of others who’ve traveled that same road. 

The soul chooses, even before we incarnate, experiences it wants to have, for reasons we are rarely privy to. It’s so easy to look at another person, perhaps someone living in a war-torn country, and think, How awful. Why would their soul ever have chosen that? 

Perhaps it wanted the experience of feeling the compassion of the world focused upon one small group of people, as occurred when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In the early months of that conflict, most of the world rallied behind the Ukrainian people. They were, for awhile, the center of our attention and concern. Perhaps a soul wanted to experience that kind of love flooding in from all over the world. 

Another reason we often want someone else’s journey to be less challenging is because we feel guilty enjoying our own good fortune when we see someone else suffering. We have a tendency to think that we should tamp down our own joy in order to show respect for the pain of the other.

“What right do I have to be so blessed, so happy, when others are suffering?”

You have every right. In fact, your tamping down your joy, for any reason, hurts others. It doesn’t help them.

Now, I’m not saying you laugh in the face of another’s misfortune. Of course not. But feeling bad for them for more than a short time, or feeling guilty about being happy with your own situation, does not help them at all, and indeed harms them in the long run. Because your emotions are part of the entire energetic field of humanity. Your happiness lifts the entire field, if only a little. And everyone in the field benefits. 

Your joy, or peace, or excitement – your high-vibrational emotions – benefit the entire world, even people you will never come in contact with.

No one is actually going the wrong way. We may not have any idea what the soul plan is for an individual or collective, but we have to trust that it’s in the highest good in some way. Follow your bliss and be the happiest version of you that you can be. Have compassion for others, and help them when and if your own soul asks you to. But never feel like you have to be sad just because they are. 

On I-95 last week, trust me, I was so glad I was going northbound. I felt bad for those stuck in the southbound traffic. But I didn’t judge them for going the wrong way. They were going in the direction they needed to go to get where they wanted, or needed, to be.

I also didn’t decide that the best way to show my support for them, and what they were going through, was to join them and share that misery with them. That was the last thing they wanted!

The more we can accept that we all have our own journeys, our own paths, the happier we’ll all be. Many people, even most, choose paths we would never choose. And that’s a good thing! 

For all that human culture, for millennia, has been built around conformity, all you have to do is look at our highways to remember that a diversity of paths, destinations, and timing is a wonderful thing.