Lose the Lectern

Daylight Savings can be especially cruel in the Midwest.

One day, it’s still 6/7 p.m. and the Sun is still poking its head out past the hills over the river valley and casting a beautiful pink-blue canvas in the sky.

The next day, it’s 4 p.m., and you might as well live in Alaska.

With this sudden drop in the daylight hours, my drive home has been especially difficult recently. Traffic turns my 20-ish minute commute into a 45-50 min. trek on weekday afternoons. It’s been rough to say the least, and those daylight hours make it THAT much worse.

Two weeks ago, I was in the midst of this awful Daylight Savings shift, and I decided I had enough. I could take the highway and sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic for 45 minutes, or I could take the residential streets and hit a few stoplights but make it home in 48 minutes without dealing with the stop-and-go stress. I decided to take the latter.

And man, was that the right move.

Although I was going a meager 35 miles per hour, I realized that I was able to see more of my world around me. I drove through a cute downtown. I saw some cool vintage homes. I even got to see some parts of the suburbs I hadn’t before. This was all because I was no longer staring at concrete walls and hearing blaring truck horns.

While making this slight change to my commute, I remembered that I actually learned this from a professor I had in journalism school. This professor was talking about generating story ideas and how good ideas come from taking the road not taken, so to speak. (Side note, happened to do an activity involving that poem a few days ago, and it made me think of this, too). By doing this, you might notice a business that the newspaper hasn’t covered yet, or see a sign for an event that you could attend, and so much more.

All that time later, this clicked with me. It’s just like how I get my best teaching ideas while on a walk with my dog or when I’m taking a shower or doing something else mindless. I let my mind wander, and the good ideas come pouring in.

I know I’m all over the place with this blog, but all I want you to do every now and then is take a different route home than you normally would. Maybe you do it on your drive into school. Maybe it’s your walk around a college campus. Maybe it’s just for fun. Or maybe it’s like me because your expressway ride home in traffic would take just as much time as taking the winding state route home.

Write down how you feel about what you see. What ideas do you come up with? How do you understand the world around you better by doing so?

You never know what you might find and, more importantly, how it might change you for the better.

Lose the Lectern