Om Is Spelled With a Yield Sign

The blinker had been going for so long it stopped sounding like a blinker and started sounding like my own heartbeat. Tick. Tock. Tick. I was in the far left lane of the southbound frontage road, nose pointed at the overpass, trying to get back to the taco place I had passed at 9:14 a.m. It was now 9:25. The taco place was 400 feet away, on the other side of a freeway.

I could see it. I could smell it, faintly, through the vents, under the diesel. A man inside was almost certainly eating a breakfast taco I had already decided was mine.

This is when it happened. Somewhere between the third light cycle and the cone that had migrated six feet into my lane since the last time I drove past it, I stopped wanting the taco. Not in a sad way. In a released way.

A woman on East Cesar Chavez will charge you $45 to lie on a yoga mat while somebody hits a crystal bowl, and you will feel nothing except the floor. I found enlightenment for the cost of a quarter tank of gas and a mild loss of faith in civil engineering.

A brief and honest theology

For the out-of-towners, and there are several hundred thousand of you now, a word on the Texas U-turn. Texas has a habit of tucking a dedicated turnaround lane under freeway overpasses, so you can swing from one frontage road to the other without sitting through the main intersection's signal. When it works, it is one of the great Texan inventions, up there with the drive-through liquor store and the concept of "fixin' to."

The Texas U-turn, in its natural state, is a smooth, unbothered arc. You glide under the bridge, past the pigeons, the busted shopping cart, and the faded spray paint nobody has explained since 1998, and you come out pointed the other way. The geometry looks like forgiveness.

On I-35 in 2026, with the rebuild rolling through town like a slow-motion weather system, the U-turn is not a lane. It is a rumor. Some days it is open. Some days it is a jersey barrier with an orange sign that says TURNAROUND CLOSED in the confident font of a state agency that will not be taking questions. Some days it is technically open, but you reach it by way of a temporary lane painted over the ghost of three older temporary lanes. The ghosts disagree with each other.

It is very hard to stay angry at that. Anger requires a fixed object.

First practice: setting an intention

Every spiritual tradition starts by asking what you want. The frontage road asks too, but it asks it two miles before you know the answer.

Somewhere around Woodward, a sign tells you which lane goes where. That sign is stating its intentions, and it is not making a promise. Like a landlord saying the renovation will "add value for residents," it is true in some technical sense that does not involve you.

So you choose a lane. You commit. You believe.

Second practice: the miss

Every seeker misses the turn. The masters miss it on purpose.

You will get there and find that the turnaround is closed, and the detour sign is pointing toward a road that, as far as you can tell, goes into another decade. Or you'll find it open, with a delivery truck parked in it at a 40-degree angle, its hazards on, its driver nowhere to be seen. You are not going to beat that truck. Nobody is. You can only hope to outlive it.

This is the Miss, and the Miss is the whole curriculum.

People pay money to "practice non-attachment." I am attached to nothing anymore. Not the taco. Not my appointment. Not the idea that the H-E-B I am trying to reach still exists on the side of the highway I remember. You go up to the next intersection. You wait. You consider your life. A man in a lifted truck with a vinyl decal of a deer behind you also considers your life, out loud, with his horn. This is called sangha, or community.

Third practice: the long way

The frontage road is the closest thing Austin has to a pilgrimage route.

You pass the motel that is now an "extended-stay concept." You pass the billboard for a personal injury attorney who appears to be the same man, at the same age, on every billboard since the Clinton administration. You pass a strip center where a vacuum repair shop has been replaced by a store selling $14 cold-pressed juice. That one is the frontage road telling you that nothing is permanent, especially rent.

I once took a detour that started at Oltorf and ended, as best I can reconstruct it, near Ben White, approaching from a direction I'm not sure the road was built to receive. It took 22 minutes to get back to a spot I could have hit with a well-thrown Big Gulp. When I arrived I was a different man. Older, mostly. But calmer.

Fourth practice: the arc itself

And then, sometimes, it opens.

No truck. No barrier. No cone that has decided overnight to be a lane divider. Just the curve under the bridge, cool and dim, with that concrete-and-river-mud smell, the sound of 200,000 vehicles a day rumbling overhead like a monastery bell somebody filled with gravel.

You lean into it. The steering wheel turns itself back through your hands. For three seconds you are pointed at nothing in particular, which is the closest any of us will get to being free in Travis County.

Then you are out the other side, merging onto the frontage road heading the right way, and a guy in a quarter-zip is already cutting across two lanes to make the very turn you just left. He is at the beginning of the path. You do not judge him. You will be him tomorrow.

On the matter of a fee

I would like to say plainly, since everybody else is out monetizing their stillness, that I do not plan to turn this into a retreat. I am not holding a Frontage Road Mindfulness Weekend at a ranch in Dripping Springs, with a guided turnaround meditation at golden hour and a farm-to-table lunch served beside a decommissioned traffic cone.

Someone will. Next year, I'd bet on it. The cone will be reclaimed. The lunch will be $95. There will be a waitlist.

Closing meditation

Breathe in. Feel the tick of the blinker.

Breathe out. Release the taco.

Breathe in. Notice the orange sign, the jersey barrier, the cone that was not there yesterday.

Breathe out. Accept that the sign is correct, the barrier is immovable, and the cone is in charge.

Breathe in. You are now on the northbound frontage road, headed toward the place you started from, in the lane that will make you exit.

There is no place to go but around. There never was. TxDOT just finally said it out loud, in cones.