Side Streets

  Walking home from work today, I decided to take a slight detour onto a sidestreet on the east side of Yonge, on the way to Steeles Avenue. I was attracted to a sea of green that I had never seen prior to this particular walk, and found myself in a kind of abandoned park with a narrow trail of gravel and dirt running through it. Eventually, I was able to use that trail to make my way to the shopping centre at Yonge and Steeles. All the while, I kicked myself, thinking, "I have been taking the loud main street for all this time--and, after two years, here I am discovering the side street!" Why, indeed, didn't I know about it sooner?
  I am not just talking about literal side streets anymore. Side streets are often symbolic detours, where a person reaches the same destination in possibly (but not always) the same time, using a route that few people even know about. It takes a bit of courage to even find the side street: for example, part of me wanted to save time and just use the main road to get to the shopping mall and have my dinner before going home. However, curiosity and a willingness to be open overrode this imperative to be "on time", and I ended up enjoying the side street all the more. The point is: detours may take longer and might even disappoint a person's hopes or expectations, but they often teach people more things and allow them to see otherwise hidden worlds.
   How can I use this idea in my life? Another question is: how can we know when a detour is working for us? I would have to say, everything has a middle point. Too much detour becomes a problem in itself, leading to a life without focus or even a goal. But too little "detouring" can lead to a very rigid, tense mind, one that is calculating or monitoring itself to see whether it's doing what it "should" be doing. Such kind of self-restraint might make a person a champion of taking cold baths, but it doesn't always make them happy or pleasant to be with. This is because they don't have a relaxed or open way of looking at things, and might even find themselves falling into the trap that there are objective, external standards that everyone is meant to follow: the symbolic "main roads", which in fact always seem a bit too jammed with people and their emotions.