A friend and I were recently discussing something that’s surprisingly good: detours. Now, when you think of the word “detour,” you probably think of a detour off the highway that adds twenty minutes to your commute. Of course, there are other kinds of detours – ones that add a lot more than twenty minutes to the commute.
I had a detour that led me away from my first-choice college to my new wife and a different school. The friend I was just talking to is in his second year of a detour that is going to culminate in his getting a master’s degree in May. I got married at twenty. He’s getting his master’s degree at twenty-two. Detours can be good. Very good.
Neither my friend nor I ever thought that we’d be where we are now. We each had other plans of how to get where we wanted to go. Our planned destinations have changed little, if at all, but our routes have changed considerably. That’s what a detour does: it takes you where you want to go, but by a different route than you intended.
The interesting thing about a detour is that you still have to choose to take it. I guess it would be possible to decide not to detour when all of the street signs told you to do so, but you’d quickly end up driving through barricades and over unpaved surfaces, ruining your car and likely injuring yourself. The point is, most of us act wisely, take the detour, follow it with varying degrees of patience, and trust that the signs will in fact lead us to where they say they will.
I suppose you could always get lost in the midst of a detour and decide you really want to go somewhere other than you had originally intended, but what I’m talking about are the detours that just make you feel like you’re never going to get where you intended. Likewise, I’m not talking about legitimate decisions that you make or uncontrollable circumstances that change your destination rather than merely your route. All of these instances are similar to detours, but at the same time are very different. It’s interesting how these events often end up better than expected as well, but what really intrigues me is how I can set out with a goal in mind, do everything to achieve that goal, wind up taking all sorts of side roads that I never intended to take, make it to that goal, and find that my timing was just perfect.
Talking about detours reminds me of the book “The Silver Chair,” which is part of “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis. In “The Silver Chair,” Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum set out with a very specific goal in mind and have very specific instructions to follow, but they end up forgetting the instructions, misunderstanding them, thinking they might not be relevant, and so on until it’s too late to do anything right. After almost every instruction has been botched, they finally find themselves following a sign, practically by accident, that leads them to the destination they had intended to reach all along.
Every time I read that book (I’ve read it three times now, I think), I can never figure out how Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum could have reached their destination while botching all of their instructions. I can’t help but conclude that their very mistakes are what cause their ultimate success. And when I think about who gave them their instructions, I wonder if he intended for them to screw everything up in the first place or if he simply designed the instructions so that even if they messed everything up the journey would still work out in the end.
Back to my friend and I. The interesting thing about the two of us is how different our detours have been. His was marked by at least two potentially devastating events along with at least one other extreme life change. My detour has been a bit calmer. I’ve been in a little more control than he has. He has probably doubted he was really headed in the right direction more than I have. And yet, in a few short months, he is going to (presumably) get back on the road he always expected to be on, but he’ll have a lot more going for him than he ever imagined.
As for me, I’m still in the midst of my detour of sorts. As such, I can’t really say where it’s going to take me or if I’m really going to end up where I originally set out for, but so far it looks like I’m still on track. The track has changed a little and been different than I expected, but I’ve currently got more going for me than I ever dreamed of.
Matt Brumit is a junior Humanities major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
