It was a crossroads with no name. One of those forks that don’t appear on navigation apps because nobody ever thought they were worth marking. I turned right instead of left — maybe out of distraction, maybe because the sun was hitting from the other side and I couldn’t read the road clearly. The point is, I turned. That wrong turn taught me something about the luck of getting lost.
The road narrowed almost immediately. Old asphalt, marked by winters, with grass pushing in from the edges as if slowly reclaiming what had been taken from it. It wasn’t a road for going fast — not by choice, but because physically it wasn’t possible. I climbed, and the higher I went, the less I understood where I was heading. At some point I stopped. I turned off the engine. I thought about turning back.
I didn’t.
At the top there was nothing built. No viewpoint, no tourist sign, no bench placed there by someone who had decided that was a place worth noting. Just a dirt clearing where the road ended, and ahead — emptiness. Valleys opening one inside the other, colors I had no name to describe, and a silence that wasn’t an absence of sound but the presence of something else. I stood there still, helmet still on, looking.
That view wasn’t on the navigator. It wasn’t on any list of “ten places not to miss in Valtrebbia.” It had been there for centuries, and I had arrived there by making a mistake. I had written about this before — that sometimes the most beautiful roads are the ones closest to home. But that day in Valtrebbia I understood it differently
I thought about it on the way home, with the curves flowing almost by themselves under the wheels. I thought that the most beautiful thing that had happened to me that day wasn’t planned. It had happened because I had taken the wrong turn. And from there the thought slipped — as it does on a motorcycle, when the mind walks parallel to the road — toward another crossroads. One without asphalt.
I had a job that many would have held on to tightly. Salary, stability, a desk with your name on it — metaphorically, but you get the idea. I left it. Not because it was wrong in itself, but because someone important to me needed me to — and I also saw it as a way to repair something I had broken. I chose that person instead of myself. It was a mistake. I knew it even then, while signing, while smiling, while saying everything was fine.
What came after was narrow and worn like that road in Valtrebbia. Wrong period, uncertain direction, more than once stopped wondering if turning back was still possible. It wasn’t. Or maybe it was, but I didn’t — and this time too it was the right choice.
Because that crooked road brought me to where I am now. To a job I would never have looked for had I stayed safe. To people I would never have met. To a version of myself that the old me would never have imagined becoming. None of this was on the navigator.
And I’m not just talking about work. That choice had a name, a story, a future I had imagined. It went badly — as it often does, when you build something on guilt instead of truth. There was another road in between, another uncertain stretch. And then, when I was no longer looking for anything, she arrived. My wife. The place where the road stopped feeling wrong.
Maybe that’s how it works — life and its roads resemble each other more than we think. An unexpected crossroads, a wrong direction, a narrow and worn stretch you would never have chosen looking at the map. And then, without expecting it, the most beautiful view you have ever seen. The truest people you have ever met. That’s the luck of getting lost.
The luck of getting lost is this: sometimes you don’t choose the right road. You find yourself on it.