road trip

You're on the road with a friend. Perhaps the two of you are headed for the same destination; perhaps one of you is dropping off the other somewhere along the way. You take turns at the wheel; you take great care not to backseat-drive the other. You talk, you sing, you take in the scenery. The journey is long, but the company makes time fly.

Then somewhere along the way, you run into trouble. Actually, your friend drives into a mud ditch. He's sure that he can accelerate his way out of it. But you know the grinding tires do little more than deepen the ditch. You ask your friend to stop accelerating; you tell him you have to push the car to get it out of the ditch. Your friend wants out of the ditch but he doesn't want to push.

You have a few options. You can ditch your friend, hitch-hike or find some other means to get to where you need to go; it's frustrating and pointless to try to reason with him. You can sit back and let him keep doing the same thing in the hopes of obtaining a different result; you know he'll fail and you wait for your "I told you so" moment.

Or, you can get out, go to the rear of the car and push. Whatever the ditch is in the particular case - an unfulfilling job, a troubled marriage, weight gain/lack of exercise - there is no guarantee that you'd be able to get the car out of it. The only assurance is that you'll get a mud facial and on top of that, possibly an "I told you so."

What do you do?