Aussie and I went back to the woods for the first time in several months. I wore my dilapidated winter boots because, even as the edges of the forest reveal old leaves and brown earth, deep inside the snow comes up your calves; it certainly did mine and everything got wet and cold. I plan to ask Donald Trump to buy me a new pair, preferably one that fits.

Naturally, I went to the woods above the Montague Farm, where we used to live communally when Zen Peacemakers owned it, the woods I call home more than any other. Aussie was overjoyed at finally being off the road and wandered all over sniffing out the varmints that burrow deep underneath, following a million tracks, and even rolling on the snow, paws scrabbling in the air, to assuage an itch.

She finds her way, I find mine. We both know where we’re going, it’s the pools of water that feed into the creek, our destination of 20 years, only my way isn’t easy. Always after winter the old trails are unrecognizable, what with massive gray limbs on the ground, bare, leafless trees and a white landscape blocking the geographical hieroglyphs of 2025.

To my eyes, Aussie’s way of walking towards the pools looks like detour after detour, her snout to the ground sniffing madly as she’s pulled towards the brambles, then across my path and down to the creek in the valley, then over to the hemlock groves, then back up following deer spoor. But then, to her eyes, my way of walking is a detour which she can’t figure out.

How do you go straight on a trail of 99 curves, asks the old koan. To human eyes, I go straight and she takes detours. To canine eyes, I’m probably the one detouring all the time.

I owe warm thanks to Jeff Bridges for alerting me to the importance of detours. He reminded me that we all take them. Each and every life is a detour, only instead of following orange signs reading DETOUR with arrows, we make it up as we go along. My life, your life, Aussie’s life, the lives of all beings. Maybe it’s another word for karma.

And detours are interesting. You didn’t think you’d go down that road, it wasn’t in the plan, but now you’re looking at a new landscape: Look, there’s a new farm there, or Look at the sheep behind that enclosure, or See the square bales of hay dotting the pasture like crossword puzzles. Detours take you to unfamiliar places. You could grumble that they slow you down, much like your parents grumbling about why you took a year off from school when you could have gotten your degree a year earlier. But in that year off you taught English and arithmetic to children in a poor Guatemalan town, learned Spanish, and how to make fabulous pepian.

Jeff also called my attention to detourism, which invites you to travel to lesser known spots all over the globe rather than visiting just the popular destinations and being part of the mad crush. And that’s not just for travelers.

Our life is one big detour with a million little detours built in. I’m writing this now, but I paused to get up to watch a bluebird feast on thistle outside the window. Had to make that mini-detour before coming back to my chair and continuing to hit those keys.

Is there such a thing as a straight highway to wherever we are going or to wherever we want to go? I kind of doubt it, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get angry at detours, as if out there somewhere there’s a cross-universe highway that’s straight, no potholes, few exits so few opportunities to get lost, and no police chasing you down for speeding and scaring you to death with a screaming siren.

My life is a detour, and so is Donald Trump’s. For many of us, Trump wasn’t supposed to happen. Implied in that assumption was that there’s a straight, if somewhat slow, alternative route that’s the real thing, a true interstate with McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts stops along the way, trustworthy and predictable. A little like Joe Biden. Implied in so many reactions is that that’s the real thing.

But the detour called Donald Trump has caused me to listen more to people without my education or belief system, to reflect more deeply about the costs of globalization, and to contemplate the question of what it means to be an American in a way I never did before.

It’s like the parents who don’t want their child to take time off from school (e.g., mine) because there’s only one true way to attend school, and usually one true way to live your life, and that doesn’t include going off somewhere to teach English to little kids, or wherever your detour takes you. In her challenging and fascinating novel Audition, Katie Kitamura writes that only when your children become strangers in your eyes can they truly be said to have grown up and living their own lives. It’s when you shake your head and say that you can’t recognize your son or daughter anymore—that’s when you know that they’ve finally gone their own way. Not your way, they’re doing their own detour.

One question you can ask is: What happens when detours intersect? Ah, that’s where the rubber meets the road.

Another question is: We’re all following our respective detours, but where are we going? Jeff said that we’re all going to the same place, but each of us in our own way. What place is that? Is there such a place? Bernie used to tell me that life goes in the direction of realizing the One Body, realizing all our oneness.

Is that where all our detours are headed? I have no idea.