I was travelling to Accra to continue a journey that would take me farther, and that day, I decided to do something I rarely do.
I took a road I had never travelled before.
The familiar route would have taken about seven hours. This one promised to get me there in five.
Two hours.
Sometimes, two hours can sound like a gift.
So I took the unfamiliar road.
At first, I enjoyed the feeling of doing something different. There was something almost liberating about leaving the road I knew and allowing myself to discover another.
Then I began to notice the silence.
There were very few cars.
Instead, bicycles appeared along the road, one after another, their riders pedalling steadily beneath the weight of ordinary life. Some carried things that seemed too large for the bicycles beneath them. Others simply moved forward, their bodies leaning into the effort.
Then came the pragias.
They appeared from nowhere and everywhere, weaving through the road with the familiarity of people who had long ago stopped expecting perfect roads. Passengers sat behind the riders, some carrying bags, some holding onto their belongings, all of them trusting the person at the front to get them where they were going.
I watched them through the window.
Then the road changed.
Some parts were broken and uneven. Other sections were being constructed. The ground had been torn apart, leaving behind stretches that looked unfinished, almost uncertain about what they wanted to become.
For a moment, I wondered whether I had made a mistake.
Perhaps I should have stayed on the road I knew.
It was longer, but it was familiar.
This road had saved me two hours, yet it was asking something else of me.
Patience.
And as the car moved over the rough surface, I began thinking about how much the road resembled life.
We are often told to choose the shortest path.
We celebrate shortcuts.
We admire people who seem to arrive before us, and sometimes we quietly wonder why our own journey is taking so long.
But nobody tells us enough about the roads themselves.
Some people travel smooth roads.
Some travel roads that are still being built.
Some walk.
Some cycle.
Some ride in pragias.
Some sit comfortably in cars.
Yet beneath all those different journeys is the same human desire.
To arrive.
That thought stayed with me.
I began remembering the roads I had travelled in my own life. The ones I had chosen confidently. The ones I had entered without knowing where they would lead. The roads that had exhausted me. The ones that had surprised me. The ones I had wished would end sooner.
There were moments when I had looked at other people's lives and wondered why their journeys appeared easier than mine.
But sitting there, watching the cyclist push his way forward and the pragya rider navigate the damaged road, I realised something I had perhaps known all along but had never fully understood.
We cannot judge a journey simply by looking at the road.
A smooth road does not guarantee a meaningful destination.
And a difficult road does not mean that we are going nowhere.
Some roads are difficult because they are carrying us somewhere we have never been.
Some are unfinished because they are still becoming what they were meant to be.
And some roads are longer simply because that is the road we were given.
The road I had chosen was shorter.
It was also rougher.
Yet there I was, still moving.
That was the part that touched me most.
The bicycles were still moving.
The pragias were still moving.
The workers were still building.
Nobody had stopped simply because the road was imperfect.
And perhaps that is one of life's quietest truths.
We keep waiting for the perfect conditions before we begin.
We tell ourselves that we will move when everything is settled, when the road is smooth, when the obstacles disappear, when we are certain that we have chosen correctly.
But life rarely gives us that luxury.
Sometimes the road is broken.
Sometimes it is lonely.
Sometimes it is under construction.
And sometimes we discover halfway through the journey that we have never travelled this way before.
We still have to move.
That day, I set out believing I was simply saving two hours.
I returned with something far more valuable.
I understood that there is no single road to a destination.
There is the road we know.
There is the road we discover.
There is the road that takes longer.
There is the road that tests us.
And there is the road that, although rough beneath our feet, quietly teaches us who we are.
Perhaps the greatest mistake we can make is to abandon a destination simply because the road is difficult.
I looked out of the window one last time.
Another bicycle passed.
Another pragya moved steadily ahead.
The road was still rough.
The journey was still unfinished.
But everyone was moving.
And somehow, that was enough.
Because perhaps life was never asking me to find the perfect road.
Perhaps it was only asking me to keep going.
