If you’re ever on a road trip through the Southwest, there’s a stretch of desert where the phone signal dies, and the sky swallows everything. The road cuts through it like a question, the answer hidden among the sun-cracked stones and scattered bones of forgotten things.
You pass abandoned motels, sun-faded billboards that advertise places that no longer exist, and broken payphones half-buried in the sand.
There are the Joshua trees and cacti – bent, weathered, still reaching. Not up, not out. Just reaching. Like they’ve always been trying to tell you something, you’ve just now started to listen.
Jack Kerouac, the original road tripper, said, “The road is life.” The road is the only thing talking out here, with nothing but sky and silence.
The desert doesn’t explain itself. It’s just a mirror reflecting back at you, and if you’re quiet enough, it might show you what you need to see.
In a dusty old gas station, where the shelves lean and the sun has bleached everything, there’s a rack of forgotten paperbacks – desert maps, conspiracy theories, UFO sightings. Wedged in between them, thin and plain, sits a small white book: “As a Man Thinketh” by James Allen, published in 1902. No fanfare. It’s just there.
The pages flip softly from heat and time. “A man is literally what he thinks,” it reads. You toss it on the counter, a few bucks for something that feels older than the dust.
Walking back out to the car into the desert heat, the words stay just ahead of you, like a mirage on the highway, always in view, never quite arriving.
The road stretches on, wide and still, nothing but sun-baked silence. Somewhere between mile markers, the words from the book echo: “A man is literally what he thinks.”
What does that mean? And why does it feel like you already knew it, like it’s been tucked away in the back of your mind this whole time?
The mind likes to drift. Blaming the world for where you were – your boss, family, the economy – was never the answer. If that one thing just changed, then I could finally get going. Are you sure?
The desert is introspective. The way the wind moves. The stillness of sitting alone on the hood of your car on a highway nobody uses anymore.
“The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors; that which it loves, and also that which it fears.”
If your thoughts are soaked in fear, life has a way of feeding that fear. If your thoughts are rooted in strength, you’ll start seeing strength in places you never thought to look. That’s the shift. It’s not magic – just alignment.
You read some more ...“As we think in our hearts, so are we.” Not in the past or the future. But now.
Want to know what happened? It could be about what you’ve been feeding your mind every day. The doubt. The fear. The quiet resentment. The assumption that you’re stuck.
A hawk screams overhead, a coyote howls in the distance and something stirs – the question you’ve buried under years of routine: What if this isn’t the way it has to be?
Some brace for the worst and call it realism. Others lower the bar to avoid disappointment. Can I ask you a question? Has expecting less ever really protected you?
At sundown, the canyon burns Martian red, the sun sinking like a phoenix in flames – only to rise again, reborn, in the morning sky. Is that the lesson? What feels like ruin is sometimes just the start.
Kerouac said in his book “The Dharma Bums,” “I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page, and I could do anything I wanted.”
Sometimes, when waiting for a sign, you look everywhere but the place it’s been all along – right in front of you. It was never out there. It’s always been here – in the thoughts you return to, the direction you choose. Maybe that’s what it means to become what you think.
That could be what the desert has been whispering all along. Not with answers, but with space. Not with noise, but with clarity. The road you’re on has always been waiting for you to realize – you’re the one who’s paving it
• Toby Moore is a Shaw Local News Network columnist, star of the Emmy-nominated film “A Separate Peace,” and CEO of CubeStream Inc. He can be reached at feedback@shawmedia.com.