Highways seen from hotel windows, pumping highway blood.

Ah, perspective. So important to seek out a new one every now and then, and yet so difficult to do so while immersed in the routines of our day-to-day.

For me, the all important shift often comes at the other end of a long drive. The destination being not nearly as important as the act of getting there, as long as it’s far removed from the sights and sounds of my daily grind.

This weekend was the first time I’d driven this particular drive without someone sitting in the passenger seat next to me. And in all honesty, it felt the same. Better, even. Singing my own choice of music at the top of my lungs to keep myself awake proved more enjoyable than listening in silence to something of compromised choosing, while someone else snoozes beside me. And sitting in peacefully quiet thought is infinitely preferable to sitting in the loudest of silences with unspoken truths ricocheting off the walls and windows of the uncomfortably temperate car interior—one person perpetually too hot, the other continually too cold.

Guess what I didn’t realize on all of those previous drives was that I really was alone, even when that passenger seat was occupied.

And so this weekend those same highways dumped me into that same beautiful middle-of-nowhere destination, where the same arms waited to enfold me, and the same mountains waited to encircle me, and the same green waited to enthrall me. (Not to mention that same prospect of partying and bad behavior that always seems to ensue.)

And once again, I return secure in the reality of how little so many of my daily obsessions really matter in the “grand scheme of things.”

Yeah, a long weekend away will do that for you. Not to mention a healthy dose of bad behavior.