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 title: Take the Scenic Route
 date: 2021-07-07 12:00:00
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Image: http://flower.codes/assets/posts/chicken-coop.jpg

Last year, right near the beginning of the pandemic, my family and
I started enjoying going on drives. Nothing was open, so there
wasn't really anywhere to _go_, but we have the benefit of living
in an area with a lot of nature to take in. While we occasionally
parked the car and hiked around, as often as not we just drove
aimlessly and took in the sights.

Once the world started opening up again and we had places to _be_,
I started dreading getting in the car. Traffic was overwhelming and
the need to "get there" overrode any sense of "being" that we had
cultivated in earlier trips. It was in this state that I recalled a
quote I had heard years earlier by Charles Kuralt:

> "Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to
travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing
anything." — Charles Kuralt

So, in an effort to truly "see" more, we made the conscious
decision to take the long way around **no matter where we were
going**. If the scenic route took an extra hour, then we'd leave an
hour earlier. In a very literal sense, we focused on the journey,
not the destination, and I will _never_ go back.

Want to embrace this mindset without having to manually "plan" your
routes? Go into the settings for your favorite GPS app and disable
"Toll Roads" and "Highways." While you will still have the option
to go the faster way, the default route will _always_ be the more
mindful one.


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