There’s a road I take sometimes when I’m in no particular hurry — or when I’m in too much of one and need to be slowed down. It adds maybe twelve minutes to the drive. It winds past a small horse farm, a white church with a hand-lettered sign out front, and a stretch of pine woods that closes over the road like a cathedral vault in the late afternoon. I discovered it by accident years ago, took a wrong turn coming back from somewhere I’ve since forgotten, and ended up somewhere I keep returning to on purpose.
I think about that a lot. The wrong turn that became a habit. The mistake that reorganized my sense of what was worth doing.
We talk about efficiency the way earlier generations talked about virtue — as though it were a moral category, a sign of character. To take the long way around is to confess something, to admit that you are not fully optimized, not fully serious. I’ve felt that pressure. I’ve driven the interstate when my soul wanted the back road, just to get there faster, just to have the time back.
But time returned to what? That’s the question I never asked.
The minutes I saved on the highway I spent — I’m being honest — scrolling through something forgettable in a parking lot before going inside. The twelve minutes I “lost” on the winding road I spent watching a red-tailed hawk hold perfectly still in the air above a field, doing whatever hawks do when they are neither diving nor resting but simply being there, suspended between effort and ease. I don’t know which was the wasted afternoon.
I’ve started thinking of the long way around not as an indulgence but as a discipline. A practice of remaining permeable — open to the world coming in sideways, unannounced. Because most of what has shaped me didn’t arrive on schedule or by the direct route. It came the way that hawk came: out of nowhere, hovering just long enough to mean something, then gone.
The white church with the hand-lettered sign changes its message every few weeks. Last time it said something simple, almost too simple to be worth stopping for. I stopped anyway.
I’m still thinking about it, actually. I haven’t worked out yet what it means — or whether it means something particular to me, or whether I just want it to. That distinction matters, and I’m not sure I’ve made it cleanly. Maybe that’s reason enough to take the long road again soon and give it more time.