Taking the Long Way Home

The shortest route gets you back fastest; the long one gives you something to come back with.

The way home is usually a solved problem. We have found the fastest route, the one with the fewest lights and the gentlest hills, and we run it on autopilot, scarcely seeing it any more. The journey has been optimised down to a reflex, and like most optimised things it has quietly stopped being a pleasure.

The long way home is the small, deliberate undoing of that. You take the next turning instead of the obvious one. You add five minutes, or ten. You arrive a little later and, oddly, a little better.

The cost of saving time

We are forever shaving minutes off our journeys, as though the time saved were being deposited somewhere safe for later. It rarely is. The four minutes you save by taking the direct route do not accumulate into anything; they simply dissolve into the evening, indistinguishable from the minutes around them.

The long way home asks a quietly subversive question: what, exactly, were you hurrying back to? Often the honest answer is nothing in particular. The rush is a habit, not a need. And once you see that, you can afford to spend a few of those minutes on the journey itself.

What a detour gives back

The detour does not have to be scenic or special. It just has to be slightly unfamiliar. A street you do not usually take has not been worn smooth by repetition, so you actually see it: the gardens, the lit windows, the cat asleep on a wall, the smell of someone's cooking drifting out into the dusk.

This is the strange arithmetic of the long way home. By making the journey longer you make it feel shorter, because a route you are paying attention to does not drag the way a familiar one does. Time spent noticing passes differently from time spent waiting to arrive.

The autopilot route is fast precisely because you are barely there for it.

A decompression chamber

The walk or drive home is also, whether we treat it as such or not, a transition. It is the seam between the day's demands and the evening's softer ones, and a little extra length gives that seam room to do its work. The frustrations of the day have time to settle. You arrive having already begun, somewhere along the way, to put the working self down.

Rush it, and you carry the whole day across the threshold with you. Stretch it slightly, and a good deal of it gets left out on the pavement where it belongs.

Wandering on purpose

You will not take the long way every day, and you should not try to. On the wet, tired, late evenings the direct route is exactly right, and there is no virtue in suffering an extra detour for its own sake. The point is to keep the option alive: to remember, on the days that allow it, that the route home is a choice and not a sentence.

So now and then, when there is no real reason to hurry, take the turning you usually pass. Let the journey home be a small wander rather than a sprint. You will arrive a few minutes later, carrying something you would not otherwise have had, which is rather more than the minutes were worth.