Fallton Havenstonne

I was returning from a day trip when the GPS alerted me to a shortcut that would save me approximately 15 minutes. I reluctantly took it, knowing from experience that GPS shortcuts can take you down a path that would make you think that you’re lost.

From the highway, I turned onto a narrow road that weaved through a forest. A truck was close behind me, and a storm had swept through the area not too long ago. Debris, leaves and branches littered the road. Driving over them, branches snapped and leaves rustled continously since they were in both lanes.

The shortcut was only a few miles long, and I was hoping for it to end soon, since I had been gripping the steering wheel tightly. The oncoming traffic would zoom by near the turns, and I couldn’t really see beyond thirty or a forty feet. With the road still wet from the storm, I drove cautiously, slowing down near the bends and wherever I saw puddles.

I was relieved when I had made it to the last mile of the shortcut. That was until I saw a police vehicle parked in the middle of the road. The officer stood in front of his vehicle holding traffic wands, and had on a reflective vest. The truck ahead of me began to make a sharp U-turn, and I sighed, knowing exactly what that meant.

The officer gestured with the traffic wands to turn around. I noticed the driver in the truck behind me shaking his head, visibly irritated by the bad news. I peered down the road past the police vehicle before making the U-turn, but couldn’t see what was blocking the road. Maybe a fallen tree? Maybe something further down the road–out of sight?

As I drove back the way I came, my GPS tried to reroute me back toward the roadblock. It was like it wouldn’t change its mind, didn’t want to give up on the original route. Clearly, it didn’t understand why everyone was turning around.

The drive back wasn’t as bad nor stressful as when I first drove down the road. I knew what to expect along the way, and there was a truck in front of me to serve as a sort of guide.

Along the way, I kept thinking about how easy and simple the highway would’ve been, how much time it would’ve saved if I hadn’t taken the shortcut. The GPS couldn’t have known of the roadblock if it was recent. If it had been updated earlier, it would’ve notified me for sure–redirected me to the next shortest route.

After getting back on the highway, the GPS took me on a new route–one that took me through a series of backroads and small towns where there was hardly any traffic. I drove past gorgeous pastures, farms and animals, and areas that were lush with vegetation and greenery. It was quite the opposite of the experience I had driving for most of the day: highways.

Highways can be fastest route to a destination, but it doesn’t really offer the same experience and adventure that an offbeat path would give us. Even though I lost time on the shortcut, I did get to experience a new adventure on the trip.

After a nap, we wake up and think that it’s morning. We have to get up, get ready for work, maybe even make breakfast with coffee.

It’s bright outside, however. The clock says it’s 5 PM. The day hasn’t changed. It’s sunny in the afternoon, and only a couple of hours have passed since we last checked the clock.

How could a couple of hours of sleep shake and disrupt our mind so severely? What was so special about the dream?

Maybe nothing was special about it. Perhaps that nap restarted us, kind of like a computer reboot. It was as if more sleep was done in those couple of hours than in an eight-hour rest. Why is that?

Maybe our body is adjusted to those 7 or 8 hours of rest. It’s used to the timing of it: resting when it’s night, then waking up in the morning. But the two hour nap was unexpected, and happens when we’re exhausted, fatigued. That nap was needed, and it’s so reinvigorating that it was like we woke up on a brand new day.

We see patterns in our everyday experience. We see them in nature, such as when the sun rises and falls, the seasons, physical laws, as well as in numbers–even down to our routines and schedules.

But what about patterns that are seemingly invisible to us? Patterns that aren’t exactly measurable or formulaic, but fit a somewhat general rule? For example, the patterns in the way we think, behave, and how we react to certain events. Even though these fit a general pattern, when we become aware of them, we can deviate from them–create new patterns apart from the old.

The same is true of many things like stories, art, sports, and chess. In stories, there are general rules for each genre, as well as in the story progression and story arcs. In art, a certain kind of composition and color pattern (i.e. complimentary colors) works well most of the time. In sports, there are certain plays and strategies that can lead to success. And in chess, there are patterns in positions, checkmates, openings, etc.

But the exciting part of life is discovering the patterns, or at least, applying our knowledge of previous ones to discover new ones. When we become familiar with the old, we look for new things to surprise us, to pique our interest. Because as a general rule, there are always more things to discover.

When we have an insight about something, we can’t explain it. It’s almost like a gut-feeling, or an intuition about something that’s hidden, hovering just beneath the surface.

But insights usually come and go. They don’t stay with us unless we act on them or give them credence. An insight can happen when we’re writing a book, when we’re studying a natural phenomenon, or when we we’ve discerned an unusual and mysterious pattern in our everyday world.

Insights can come out of nowhere–landing on a shoulder as if to whisper in our ear. When we hear that insight speak to us, it gives a clue to unlocking a mystery that we’ve been trying to solve.

But because we don’t understand it (or the source from which it came), we’re prone to dismiss it. But like knowledge that comes from a dream, an insight doesn’t always come in a neat package, but by sudden, spontaneous burst of magic.

Tangents can lead us astray. They lead us down a series of seemingly random thoughts, and like cobwebs, they expand in all directions without rhyme or reason. Tangents can pull us away from our day-by-day routine, and take our mind down a road that’s obscure and dreamlike.

But tangents are not so random after all. They are products of our subconscious, inspiration tucked away and forgotten about. They exist to open our eyes to see things in new ways, to look at the familiar from a new perspective, an oblique angle.

Tangents help us to see new possibilities. They can flash in our mind like when we have that a-ha moment and make a discovery about something. They open doors, invite us to follow them to the unknown. But when our mind lands on a tangent, it’s so easy to shrug it off and think that it was just nothing.

I remember working at an office years ago and thinking how slow time used to tick by. It moved at a snail’s pace, and to keep from boredom, I’d challenge myself to not look at the clock on the wall every ten or twenty minutes. Even when I was tempted to, I’d tell myself to wait, that the next time I looked at it, it’d be lunch time.

This was when smart phones didn’t exist yet, when most of my workday involved handling papers and folders and desktop computers and CRT monitors were still a thing. The days seemed to drag on as if they would never end. Yet, here I am, over ten years later, and those days at the office are like a blink in my memory.

In those days when I didn’t have a smart phone to check my email or open up apps, I had to dwell my thoughts, dwell on what I had been reading or on something I had heard on the radio. I would dwell so deeply that I often began to forget about time and became fixated on a singular thought. Those countless hours past a little faster, and each day became a challenge to busy my mind with what I considered creatively or intellectually stimulating.

In hindsight, those countless hours were merely a reflection of my perception of time. Time is experienced based on how much we participate in an event or how little we do. When we’re bored, we’re waiting for something to happen: waiting to be entertained, engaged, or to react to whatever comes our way.

An hour can feel like a full day when we have nothing to do. But when we’re engaged or working on something that’s new and challenging, an hour can feel like a few minutes. In that moment, time is less thought of, and the moment itself becomes paramount compared to the seconds that tick by.