The long way home

There are two ways from the office to my door. One is eleven minutes if the lights are kind, along a road with four lanes and no shade. The other is thirty-something minutes and goes the wrong direction for the first kilometre, past a workshop that repairs sewing machines, over a footbridge, and along a canal where the path is wide enough for two bicycles and nothing else.

I took the fast one for two years. Now I take the other one most days, and I have been trying to work out what actually changed.

The obvious answer

The obvious answer is that it is nicer, and that is true but unhelpful. It is nicer because of shade, because there are no trucks, because the canal smells like water rather than diesel. None of that is an argument, it is a preference, and preferences are cheap.

A better answer

What the long route actually does is give me a boundary. Fifteen minutes of moving slowly with nothing to read sits between the last thing at work and the first thing at home, and neither of them follows me across it. The fast route delivers me to the door still holding the last conversation of the day.

The short route ends when you arrive. The long one ends when you have stopped thinking about where you came from.

The rainy-season problem

In the afternoons it floods, sometimes ankle deep for an hour, and the canal path becomes a bad idea. So the route has a wet version: two streets up, past the laundry that never seems to close, and then a covered market where you can walk the bicycle through and come out the other side. It is not the same thing. It is still better than the road.

What I am not claiming

I am not claiming this is a philosophy. I am not suggesting anyone else should trade twenty minutes of their day for a footbridge. It just turned out that the thing I thought was commuting was, in a small way, the thing that made the rest of the day work, and I only noticed after I stopped doing it the efficient way.

The sewing machine workshop has a dog now. It sleeps under the counter, entirely unimpressed by bicycles.