Recently, I was driving down ‘Bootlegger’ road, which is a combination of winding curves, and a long arrow straight ribbon of asphalt that leads you north, out of Great Falls, Montana. My job takes me to the ‘Big Sky’ country a number of times per year. For me, it’s always a place of reflection. There is a level of solitude and ‘bigness’ that accompanies these journeys, and it gives my soul pause.
This last trip, it was 6 degrees below zero with ice and snow. For North Carolinians, that might cause mass suicide, or at a minimum total hysteria, with a rush on toilet paper and bottled water. Montana folk though, just keep moving along. Within 10 minutes of getting in my rental car I was passed by a school bus loaded with kids. (I love this place!)
Here, on my first night, as the coolness of the sun finally settled behind the jagged, snow peaked mountains, the bright blue sky transitioned to a darker deep blue, purple… and eventually black overtook my field of view, as a chorus of stars stepped on stage to sing down their majestic melody, as if twinkling diamonds were spilling out of the night sky.
When I say it’s big I mean it’s BIG. Your eyes can’t take it all in and that’s when the ‘reflection’ and awe of what you are not just seeing but experiencing, takes over. ‘Bootlegger’ road takes you through the tundra of Montana. 
This road moves you through and around towering Mesas that have snow painted down their sides, filling in the crevasses left from years of weather and time… past fields that are covered with white ice and snow, with only the bleached brown tundra grass peeking up through, reaching for the sky. 
I recently read something that came to my mind as I traveled down this lonely piece of ribbon, disconnected from those I love.
In a new essay on her website, entitled “Crying,” Jane Fonda reflected on aging and how it’s affected her.
“I find my emotions are way more accessible than they were when I was younger and I’ve come to feel it has to do with age. I have become so wonderfully, terribly aware of time, of how little of it I have left; how much of it is behind me, and everything becomes so precious,” Fonda wrote. “With age, I am able to appreciate the beauty in small things more than when I was younger perhaps because I pay attention more. I feel myself becoming part of everything, as if I bleed into it.”
Without getting too deep into the ‘we are all one thing’, I want to jump off of this to say the following. There has been such a search for significance over the years and generations, yet I think it is staring us right in our faces. Hundreds of years ago, we humans were more concerned about surviving the winters than being ‘important’, ‘significant’, or ‘aware’.
Now, with our ease of living, our lives can get caught up in side eddies so easily, it’s time to circle up and think this through. I hear all of the time, as I am sure you have also, ‘Make your life count for something’.
I am saying, as I travel down this cold, lonely, ice covered ribbon of pavement in the middle of nowhere, Montana, with a sky full of diamonds beaming down on me, “Your life already counts and is already significant.” It was paid for and given as a gift.
This = Significance, Important, Matters, Makes a Difference… = Done
It isn’t about you making it anything as much as letting it carry you where it will as you live life to the fullest.
You are not an accident, a happenchance, an ‘oh, just because’. You ‘are’ a purpose and anyone and anything that tells you differently has led you astray. With the significance of millions of diamond like pinpoints staring down at you, as you travel down the ribbons of your life, know that every footstep, every mile, every winding road, bump and smile have a purpose.
You don’t have to make it count. It already does. Why not let that gift permeate your being like the the night sky overtakes the day.
May your journey this week be filled with Love.
Jeff Kennon
