Do you know where you need to go?

I read recently that sometimes you go down a path toward a goal that turns out to not be the goal at all; that the reason you thought you had to do something or wanted to do something is not, in the end, the real reason...it is just a mechanism to get you to an end that you really do need to get to...the real purpose of your journey.

Today this poem showed up in my inbox from The Writer's Almanac:

Wrong Turn  by Luci Shaw

I took a wrong turn the other day.
A mistake, but it led me to the shop where I found
the very thing I'd been searching for.

With my brother I opened a packet
of old letters from my mother and saw a side of her
that sweetened what had been deeply sour.

Later that day the radio sang a song from
a time when I was discovering love,
and folded me into itself again.


"Wrong Turn" by Luci Shaw, from What the Light Was Like.

Reminds me of something I read in the book Blink too. We don't often know consciously what we need/want. But somewhere inside there is a knowing. Or is there?