Whew! We're coming to the end of this leg of your journey. It's time for you to go on alone...which was the idea we both had in mind from the start, right? There's a vast highway in front of you.
There's just one more stop that I truly hope you WON'T make.
You see that little dome of light ahead in the darkness?
That's the Last Rest Stop. It looks like a 24 hour restaurant...the kind truckers frequent, where you'll see burly men hunched over bitter coffee and plates of food that glisten with grease.
There certainly seem to be a lot of cars here. Trucks too. But they look like they've all been here a while. A few look so rusty, I'm not sure they'll even run any more.
If you go in (and just trust me on this...cause we're not going anywhere NEAR that place) you'll hear guys talking. It's what they specialize in here: they all talk. They talk and talk and talk.
They grouse about how the other travelers have nicer cars and the kind of stuff THEY could do if THEY had that kind of bankroll to work with. The problem is that they've been talking about it so long that they've forgotten how to DO anything.
They sit for hours -- lifetimes -- and talk about what they're going to do when they get out of here. They talk about the places they'll go...the things they're going to see. They share wistful but uneducated opinions with anyone who will listen. But they never DO anything. Maybe they're afraid they don't have enough gas to make it to the next rest station (because they just love resting) or maybe they're afraid they'll lose their way in the dark.
The funny thing is that they all turn around in perfect unison to glare out the window whenever they see a vehicle driving past them, going on down the highway. They hate the people who are actually going somewhere because it reminds them they aren't. And they don't have any plans to. They don't like to think about that.
One last piece of advice? Please don't stop here. Please don't. Don't even slow down. In fact -- put a little more pressure on the accelerator. Wave to them as you drive past. But make SURE you drive past.
You know where you're going and you have a good idea of how you're going to get there...and what you're going to do when you arrive.
So drive on, friend. It looks like the sun is ready to come up.
Your audience is waiting for you out there somewhere.