Expressway To Your Heart

Lots of singers and bands have record this over the years, but the original version was a big hit for the Soul Survivors.

It was one of the biggest songs in 1967, riding high on the R&B and Hot 100 charts.  Unfortunately, this was their only big hit.  They hit the charts a couple more times, and then, by the mid-1970’s, went their separate ways.

It’s been covered by an array of talent, including Eddie Money, Amen Corner, the Breakfast Club, George Clinton and the Blues Brothers, just to name a few.

To me, it’s a song about short cuts.  We all want that expressway, whether it’s to someone’s heart, or it’s to something else we want.

And the truth is, there just aren’t any short cuts.

Sure, we all hear about some “overnight success”, but the real ones are little more than a fluke.  Yet, somehow, so many of us look at them and try to figure out how to emulate whatever it is they did to try and get the same results.

And it doesn’t work that way.

There was a story recently about a man who stopped in at a convenient store to break a big bill, so he bought a couple lottery tickets and won ten million dollars.  I’m pretty sure, without even checking, that when that story broke, a lot of people went and did the same thing.

There weren’t any follow-up stories about the same thing happening again.

It’s just not a good business plan.

The other thing is, without standing in someone’s shoes, you don’t know what it really took for them to become an “overnight success”.

People like to site some writers in the same way as that guy who lucked out with the lottery.  Stephen King, John Grisham and J.K Rowling are usually on that kind of list, almost as though they’re undeserving of their success.

But all three worked for years at difficult jobs.  Years.  And somehow, around those difficult jobs, and other challenges the Universe threw at them, they managed to pursue that goal of writing to eventually find that expressway and become that “overnight success”.

Never mind that Stephen King lived with his family in a trailer while he taught high school English and struggled to make ends meet.  Or that John Grisham had a job watering bushes for a dollar an hour.  Or that J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book on scraps of paper on the commuter train to and from a job that barely kept her out of poverty.

Instead, though, we see the successes they’ve achieved, and feel like we deserve it, too.

And maybe we do.  But we have to be willing to put in the work for it, and that’s where it falls apart for many of us.

We let ourselves become so consumed with the negative that we often can’t see a way out.  Or we put our energies into trying to find that short cut, and then wallowing in our disappointment when our YouTube video only gets 3 views.

It doesn’t help when we also expend so much energy on things way beyond our control.  We may not even realize we’re doing it, but we can’t help thinking about everything that could go wrong that it can become paralyzing.

Sadly, although appropriately, there’s no simple fix for any of this.

It requires a change in attitude.  At minimum, an adjustment, at maximum, a complete make-over.

And the truth is, whatever it is you want to do or achieve, it will mean so much more if you actually did earn it, putting in the blood, sweat and tears to make it happen, rather than waking up one day to find you have whatever you want with no effort at all.

The effort makes it good, makes it valuable.  And the path to get there is different for each one of us.

Besides, like the song says, the expressway is too crowded.