Driving on America’s Most Historic Road

I am here standing on what looks to you as a regular road. But this, my friends, [music] is very much not a regular road. This is the famous Lincoln Highway. The [snorts] Lincoln Highway? What are you talking about? Well, great question. Let me explain. In [music] the year 1913, a businessman named Carl Fiser had an absolutely crazy idea. [music] And that was to build a highway connecting New York all the way to San Francisco. Now, you have to understand something about America back then. There were some cars. There were some roads. There was just one problem that the roads were terrible. They were filled with mud and dirt and potholes. And half the roads barely [music] connected to anything. Traveling across America by car wasn't a road trip. It was more like a survival expedition. And so when Fiser proposed this highway, plenty of people [music] weren't convinced. Who's going to pay for this? Did America really need a giant road stretching across the continent? What was the point of it exactly? But Carl Fiser was undeterred [music] because he and his partners understood something. And that is that a road doesn't just connect two places. It creates possibilities that didn't exist before. And so he was on a mission to make it happen. The problem was that he couldn't get funding for the whole project. So instead, he convinced people to fund little sections called seedling miles, just enough road to show people what they were missing. And slowly, mile by mile, America began to understand. Suddenly, communities were becoming connected. Suddenly, people [music] could travel to places they couldn't before. Suddenly, businesses could expand and goods could move and ideas could spread in ways that it couldn't before. And before you know it, the highway took off and became the very first road. road, the very first one that connected America all the way from the east to the west. And the man who at first was shown nothing but skepticism was celebrated as a hero for the world didn't get any bigger, but people's worlds certainly did. And I think there's an extraordinary lesson here because sometimes without even realizing it, we build ourselves beautiful little islands. We get married, get a job, we buy a house, we establish a routine, we have our friends, our little shaw, our schedule, our familiar shroom. Everything is comfortable. Everything is predictable. [music] And there's nothing wrong with any of it except that sometimes we get so comfortable on our little island that we forget that there's a whole entire world beyond it. An entire world of Tyra we've never explored ideas that could completely [music] change the way we understand Hashem, ourselves, the people around us. Sometimes we listen to the same three ideas from the same three people for 20 years straight. Sort of made aware that there are extraordinary people out there we could connect with that could challenge us and inspire us and open our minds in our nishamas in ways that we literally never thought possible. new forms [music] of we never imagined we were capable of entire parts or we've never visited and why because we never built the roads and building roads it's not easy of course sometimes we you have to leave your comfort zone meet meet somebody different open a safer you don't understand start respecting a person from another group in class that you weren't necessarily trained in respecting or asking a question that makes you uncomfortable I'm not saying it's [music] easy at all sometimes the first few miles are downright bumpy but you know what happens when you finally build that road suddenly you're making connections you've never imagined and you're discovering opportunities you never knew existed and you're seeing vistas [music] because you didn't even know we're there. Carl Fischer understood something more than a century ago, and that is that the greatest tragedy isn't always that there's nowhere to go. Sometimes it's that there's an entire world waiting for us, and we've never bothered to build a road to get there. So, build a road because you have no idea how far your Nishama can go until you give it somewhere new to travel.