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It’s really nothing special at first glance.
An old orange wall with a faded sign painted directly onto the bricks decades ago. The words “ONE WAY STREET” are barely visible now, worn down by a hundred years of desert sun, wind, rain, dust, and time.
In fact, you may have to look twice to read it.
Maybe that’s why I like it.
One day, a longass time ago, this thing was the pride of the craftsman who painted it. Crisp, white letters on a deep black background made a perfectly legible mark for anyone so bold as to adventure up this road to read.
The reason for the sign is simple: keep traffic moving in one direction on a narrow street where two-way traffic would be utter chaos.
It wasn’t a suggestion or given as friendly advice.
It was the law.
You go one way.
I started to consider how much life resembles that old sign.
(OK, yeah, sometimes when I am out walking around with my camera, I start waxing philosophic. Nothin’ wrong with that. I ain’t knockin’ over gas stations for lunch money, so let it go.)
Life is a one-way street.
We know it is, but we keep acting like it’s a roundabout with infinite possibilities. We live in the past, fear the future, and ignore the present as if it were nothing.
You don’t get to back up and try that conversation again.
You don’t get to return to 1987 and make a different decision.
You don’t get to revisit your twenties with the wisdom you have now.
(Although Hollywood finds that scenario too attractive to not make dozens of films based on that very premise.)
The road only runs in one damn direction.
Forward.
We spend an astonishing amount of energy staring in the rearview mirror. We replay those awful mistakes. We rewrite arguments. We imagine alternate timelines where we took a different job, married a different person, moved to a different city, bought a different house.
As if with enough magical thinking, the street would somehow run both ways, and we could go back and, well… just fix it.
It doesn’t. It won’t. It never will.
But that doesn’t mean we’re trapped.
No, my friends, actually far from it.
It means that the choices available to us exist only in the direction we’re traveling.
Up ahead. Around that next corner. Where the road vanishes into the horizon.
You can’t change the direction of your street.
But you can choose a different street.
You can turn onto a new road at the next junction. They happen dozens of times a day.
Choose to do X instead of Y, and just like that, you’ve changed streets for a while. Yes, in the same direction, but with different scenery.
You can choose a different destination, at least for the foreseeable future. At some point the destination is written for us, and we must arrive someday.
You can take the scenic route or the difficult route or the route nobody else understands. I like those roads over high passes with no guardrails, and spectacular views.
But no matter which you choose, you will still move forward.
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I’ve noticed that the older I get, the more valuable this realization becomes.
When you’re young, it feels like life is an endless network of roads stretching forever into the distance. The forks in the road are all lit up with flashing neon, diners filled with friends full of advice on how to continue.
But at some point you realize the road is still open, but it isn’t endless.
That’s not depressing, at least it isn’t for me.
It’s simply clarifying.
The awareness that time moves only one way makes each and every choice more meaningful. It reminds us that today isn’t a rehearsal for another day.
We aren’t on a practice run, guys, we in it now!
That old sign in Bisbee is fading a little every day.
We can’t see the fading in the short run, but over the next 20 years, it will most likely be gone.
The wall will remain, because that is what walls do.
Or maybe not.
Walls are not impervious to change.
And maybe the message was never really about traffic.
Maybe it was always a reminder painted on a brick wall in the Arizona desert:
Keep moving.
The road only goes one way.
But there’s so much to do along the journey.
If you’re over 40 and still hungry to make, build, and create, stick around. This space is for people who aren’t done yet (and never will be). I’ve got five decades of wins, failures, comebacks, and creative battles under my belt, and I’m sharing everything that still works—and burning the rest.
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Just real tools for building a creative life on your own damn terms.
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Here are three videos I am impressed with on the subject of creativity:
