I’ve Finally Decided
Where does your future lie?
“Oh, I’ve finally decided my future lies beyond the yellow brick road…” — Elton John, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”
I have watched The Wizard of Oz countless dozens of times throughout my life. Though originally intended to be a political allegory in L. Frank Baum’s 1900 source material, the 1939 movie holds up well as a metaphor for self-discovery and wild goose chases.
Dorothy reverses her decision to run away from home, but encounters a rampaging tornado head-on after her family has given up looking for her and fled to the safety of their storm shelter. She suffers a blow to the head and wakes up in the acid trip that is Oz.
After discovering she has whacked a pretty bad person by landing a house on her and incurring the wrath of her much-worse sister, Dorothy quickly decides she needs to figure out how to get back to Kansas. She is advised that the Wizard of Oz can make this happen, and that she must follow a winding road from where she is to the Emerald City, where her dream of returning to normalcy can become reality.
Dorothy spends roughly the next three hours winding her way through all sorts of danger, meeting increasingly weird beings along the way. She fights her way through flying monkeys, apple-throwing trees, and what I can only assume was a field of heroin, only to find out after being sent on a side-mission to kill the second witch that the Wizard is a load of crap after all.
Despondent Dorothy, along with her outraged companions, are about to give up all hope. Then, Glenda the Good Witch reappears for the first time in hours to inform Dorothy that she didn’t need the Wizard to grant her wish; the power to go home was within her all along. Three ruby slipper heel-clicks and a mantra of “There’s no place like home!” later, she wakes up to her cheery life in the Great Depression and all is well again.
Dorothy placed her hope in someone else to fix her, which led to a lot of bad decisions and unnecessary drama. If she had been a strong enough person in the first place, she would have realized she could have fixed her own problem without going through all of that. The kicker, though, is that she needed to go through that heartache to discover the power she truly had inside her all along. The Yellow Brick Road and the Wizard weren’t the answer to her problem, but they were the process she had to go through to come out on the other side.
Aerosmith was right: life’s a journey, not a destination. No matter what we go through — good or bad — there is something to learn from it. All of our experiences are single puzzle pieces that make up a much larger picture. Sometimes we get those puzzle pieces out of order and the picture makes no sense. When that happens, don’t give up. Examine those pieces and how they fit together, and find the right picture.
The Yellow Brick Road that is your life’s journey won’t lead you to instant fame, fortune, or certain happiness. However, the experiences you have and the people you meet along the way will shape you into someone who is more open to the truth of things. That truth is simply that you have the power inside you to discover who you really are, what you need to fix inside yourself, and what your purpose is in this life.
Don’t be afraid to travel that road. Just know that at the end of it is the one thing you’ve always needed to find: the real, authentic you.
