Shortcut to nowhere

I have a friend who hates shortcuts if they involve country roads. Not because these roads are often narrow or because the speed limit is a little less. Nope, it’s because he thinks they are so boring that they must take longer and aren’t really shortcuts at all. For example, I know about this one shortcut because of someone else. It cuts almost 30 minutes off the drive between these two towns which people in this area tend to travel to and from on a frequent basis. So the first time I was taking this trip with this particular friend, I directed him to turn at a certain point. He was like, ‘Huh, why?’ And I explained about the shortcut. He gave me a rather funny look but complied. After about 15 minutes, he looked over at me and said ‘We’ve been out here for over an hour. This isn’t a shortcut.’ Uhm, okay. He could see the clock on the dash just as well as me and surely could see how long it had actually been. Right? So, I corrected his thinking. He started arguing with me over how insane I was and how we were now lost in the woods. Then on the other side of the road, you could see the back side of one of those signs which tells you how far it is to the next town. Once he got past it a bit, he screeched his car to a halt, opened his window and stuck his head out. After he had got a good look at the sign, he pulled his head back into the car. He then turned his head to me and said, ‘Huh, we’ve only gone about 20 miles since turning onto this highway.’ He slowly rolled his window up and brought the car back up to speed. ‘Still, on the way home, we aren’t taking this way. It’s so boring, I might fall asleep.’ Not more than a minute later, we came over a rise and there the freeway was. He was saved from the boredom of a country road. Now, I hadn’t found the road to be unexciting at all. Quite the opposite in fact. Sure, there isn't anyone else out there. However, the woodlands occasionally open up to meadows with cows or horses. There were birds in the trees. And as an added bonus there are two old country churches along the short stretch of road. But in life, perspective is everything. If we see this one object as red, it will probably always be red to us. Even if everyone else in the world tell us it is in fact blue. Does that make us wrong? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes it pays to be the one fish swimming in the opposite direction of everyone else. We get to find something no one else does. Sometimes it only makes us miss being part of something greater than ourselves.