The long way round

There are two ways from my flat to the harbour. One takes eleven minutes and follows the main road. One takes nineteen and goes through a cemetery, past a primary school, and down a lane that smells — in November, overwhelmingly — of jasmine.

I have taken the long one almost every day for two years. I have never once regretted it. And I still feel, every single time, at the corner where the decision happens, a small pull towards the short one.

That pull is worth looking at, because it is not about time. I do not need the eight minutes. I have, on many occasions, saved the eight minutes and then spent them standing in a kitchen.

Efficiency as a default rather than a decision

What I think is happening is that efficiency has become the option which does not require justification.

Taking the short way needs no reason. Taking the long way needs one — and the reason has to be good enough to say out loud, at least to yourself, which means it has to be phrased in terms the short way would accept. It clears my head. I think better afterwards. It counts as exercise.

All of those are true, and all of them concede the point. They justify the long way by its output, which is exactly the frame that makes the short way obviously correct in the first place.

The jasmine is not an input

The honest reason I take the long way is that the lane smells of jasmine in November, and that is not doing anything.

It does not clear my head; some days it fills it. It is not an investment in a later hour’s productivity, and on the days when it happens to be, that is a side effect I did not go for. The walk is not a means. It is one of the small number of things in a day that is straightforwardly the point.

Once I stopped defending it in output terms, the pull at the corner got noticeably weaker. Not gone — the habit of justification is older than the walk — but weaker.

Where this generalises, and where it does not

I want to be careful, because this is the kind of observation that inflates.

It does not mean the long way is always better. Most efficiency is genuinely good, and I would not like to fill in a form more slowly on principle. The overwhelming majority of tasks are means, and treating them as ends is its own well-documented pathology.

What it means is narrower: there is a category of thing that is not a means, the category is small, and it is under continuous quiet pressure from a habit of thought that has no vocabulary for it. The pressure does not arrive as an argument. It arrives as the absence of one — as the sense that the short way needs no defending and the long way does.

Noticing which way round that is has been most of the work.