It’s funny how perception works.
This morning, I happened to not have to take Brian to school, so I went a different way to work…or so I thought. I turned onto 41 South and didn’t see anything in front of me. Sweet. Those 10-15 minutes really do make a difference.
Wrong.
I topped the hill at the cemetery, not 1 mile from Mack Dobbs, and saw the line of cars. It can’t be that bad, right? Surely not. I’ll stick it out. Well, after 20 minutes and having moved about 1 mile, I was done. So, I started searching my brain for alternate routes. There are no more direct routes to work than the one I was on, but if I stayed there, I was going to go crazy. I turned off and eventually joined the road on my “normal” way to work.
This got me thinking, though. Technically speaking, I probably would have made it to work about the same time. After all, I had to re-route myself and get to my normal route, which probably took about 15-20 minutes. That 15-20 minutes would have been spent just the same sitting there in traffic (I’m guesstimating here, obviously).
Yet, I was willing to jump through those hoops. Why? Because the perception of being able to “go” is so much more satisfying than just sitting there. It’s as if we’re trapped (both literally and figuratively) in our car, and we can’t break free. As much as we want to. The re-routing allowed me to not have to experience that trapped feeling anymore. It’s like escaping from jail. The world seems so much bigger and full of possibilities when you’re mobile and free. Not constrained by the mass of metallic humanity.
We are still talking about traffic, right?!
