There’s a stretch of highway between here and my sister’s place where I always mean to take the cutoff at Millbrook Road. It saves maybe eight minutes. And almost every time, I sail right past it — not because I forget, exactly, but because by the time I see the sign I’ve already decided, somewhere below the level of conscious thought, that I’m not going to take it. I watch the green sign appear and recede in my mirror, and I think: well, that’s that. Then I drive the long way, which is not really the long way anymore, just the way I go.
I used to call this absentmindedness. Now I’m not so sure.
There’s a particular kind of choice that isn’t quite a choice — or rather, it’s a choice that happens before you arrive at the moment where choosing feels possible. You’ve already leaned into the curve. The exit is behind you. And something in you knew, I think, even before the sign came into view, that you weren’t going to take it. The decision didn’t occur at the decision point. It occurred somewhere earlier and quieter, while you were thinking about something else entirely.
I find this unsettling in ways I can’t fully name. Because if that’s true on the highway, where else is it true? How many of my considered, deliberate choices were actually made three miles back, when I wasn’t paying attention? I don’t mean this in a fatalistic way — I believe in agency, in the real weight of human choosing. But I’ve started to suspect that I have less access to my own decision-making than I generally assume. That by the time I’m reasoning through something, I’m often constructing an explanation for a direction I’ve already begun to travel.
What I’ve found, oddly, is that this doesn’t depress me the way it probably should. It makes me want to pay attention earlier. Not to the moment of decision but to the mile before it — to what I’m assuming, what I’m avoiding thinking about, what I’ve quietly taken off the table without ever announcing it. The examined life, someone famously said, is the only life worth living. But maybe the examination has to start further upstream than we usually think.
I took the Millbrook cutoff two weeks ago. First time in maybe a year. It saved eight minutes, and I felt oddly proud of myself, which tells you something — though I’m still working out exactly what.