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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Emilee O’Leary, in high school I developed my own secret code to take notes in class so people wouldn’t copy off my paper, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a story about taking shortcuts and the different ways to measure their value.
Fun Fact
I am a born and bred Minnesotan, so here’s a fun fact about Minnesota. Minnesota has more than 90 thousand miles of shoreline, which is more than California, Florida and Hawaii combined. How you like that? Appropriately, there is one recreational boat per every six people in Minnesota. When I first met a friend of mine, who came to Minnesota from South Korea, she expressed her shock in how everyone seems to disappear over the weekend. She said, “You all disappear! Where do you go?” My family and I go to our cabin in Northern Minnesota, and I’d expect that’s what a lot of Minnesotans say! Everyone either goes to a cabin or takes their boat to a lake and spends the long summer days baking in the sun. We have enough shorelines, after all, to accommodate one boat per every six people.
Shortcuts
Throughout my life I’ve spent a lot of time in a car. As I mentioned in my fun fact, I’ve been coming to my family’s cabin in Northern Minnesota nearly every weekend in the summer since I was a baby. While I was high school aged and younger, my parents took my siblings and I on several road trips. And on other trips that we took where we did not drive, we’d rent a car so that we could explore the area.
And now that I’m an adult I still do a lot of driving. From a 12-mile trip to and from work to the still-regular trips to the cabin to the occasional road trip, I’m no stranger to sitting as passenger or driver during long car rides.
The experiences traveling in a car as a young person had a tremendous effect on the decisions I make as an adult driver. I would rather take a longer route home from work than sit in traffic, for example, because I hate being stopped in traffic. Most people do, though, right? But sometimes taking an alternate route takes just as long, or longer, to reach your final destination as it would be to sit in traffic.
I also tend to choose quieter routes than faster routes. If I can avoid city streets or busy cross-town interchanges, I will do it. One of my favorite aspects to Minneapolis is that the city itself really isn’t that big. There are a couple square miles of tall buildings and busy shopping centres, but you can drive a half-mile away from these city streets in nearly any direction and it feels like you are far away from the hubbub. Having experiences places like Honolulu and New York City, I appreciate this characteristic more than ever before.
I know I inherited a lot of this from my dad, because he was the driver throughout my highly formative childhood. In order to explain this, I’ve got to set the scene a little.
My dad was a quiet dude. He didn’t use words unnecessarily and sometimes it took him a while to process a question, so it might seem like he was ignoring you or didn’t hear you… but when he processed it he’d then answer your question with just as many words as was necessary. When he had a good joke or funny story he would not shy away from telling it, and he could laugh. I mean, he could really laugh.
He was a very unique kind of observant, too. He noticed things other people wouldn’t, and he noticed people that often got ignored. We’d be driving to the cabin in pitch darkness and suddenly he’d swerve the car and point the headlights into the woods, point and say, “Look at the deer!” He’d inspect every building he’d walk into, not because he was looking for flaws but because he saw the detail that held every aspect of it together.
From a very young age, I can remember my dad swerving off the main road on the way up to or home from the cabin because of traffic or construction and saying something like, “I know a shortcut.”
In hindsight, I don’t think my dad ever truly thought he was taking a shortcut. I think he never wanted to sit in traffic. My mom pointed out that he was an adventurer, too, and was curious to see what was down a given road. He’d tell us it was a shortcut, but really it was just his curiosity taking over.
That said, the word “shortcut” very quickly lost its original meaning. Whenever it was used, we’d have to ask for clarification: “Wait, do you mean a real shortcut, or a Daddy shortcut?” Soon, taking shortcuts was synonymous with taking an adventurous route along a very usual path. My siblings and I would groan, but my dad never cared!
Here’s what I learned.
My parents make up a lot of who I am. Since my dad’s death, I’ve had more people tell me that I remind them of him than ever before. This was a compliment before his death, but now it’s an honor. My dad was not perfect by any means, but he had so many excellent qualities that I have been trying to emulate for a long time. Without him here, I feel like I’ve been able to see his life more objectively than ever before.
By reflecting on the shortcuts he used to take, or at least what he would call shortcuts, I realized a couple really important things about his character that I am trying to adopt moving forward.
Firstly, my dad was never rushed. Everything took the time it took, and he’d work steadily until the work was done. Taking shortcuts, going on ATV adventures, taking long walks in unusual places, they were all ways for him to connect with a pace that was more his speed.
Secondly, my dad never revealed whether he was fazed by our chiding. When we’d ask if he’d taken one of his shortcuts, or he’d say it himself, and then we’d groan in response… he never seemed to let it hurt his feelings or influence his decisions. He just did what he did because he wanted to do it, and he saw something we never did in making those choices regardless of the opinions around him.
My mom thinks that he called his detours shortcuts because he didn’t want to explain himself, but it’s interesting to me that he chose the word shortcut instead of, like, detour. I can’t tell you what prompted him to use that word in the first place, but if I was to do my own analysis of his character and mindset, having the privilege to know him as an adult, I would say that he was evaluating more than one aspect to every shortcut.
Getting stuck in traffic, taking the same route over and over, there is a lot of time that goes into that. The only objective in that action is to get from Point A to Point B. But when you turn a usual route into a shortcut, you’re looking for a different way to do something… you’re looking to multitask a routine with an adventure. Perhaps the most well-known definition of shortcut is a shorter, alternative route, but it also means an accelerated way of doing or achieving something.
Dad’s shortcuts were an accelerated means to avoid frustration of long drives by being stuck in traffic, and in his mind he’d rather spend a bit longer in the car exploring a different route than being stuck in the same route in a gridlock.
If you think I’m reading too much into this, that’s fine. I might be creating meaning out of nothing, but I also think that our responses to frustrations are some of the most telling observations we can make about one another. And when I think back on my dad’s handling of long road trips, I never think of him as frustrated. I always think of him searching for a better way.
So the challenge I’ve made for myself is to look for a better way, and not to psyche myself out in thinking about the time it will take to explore, but to enjoy the experience. Maybe a shortcut will take more time, but there are different ways to evaluate time.
I’m Emilee O’Leary and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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