Day 10: Taking a Different Route Home

At the gentle request of my beloved niece Megan, I embarked on this journey of a zero-dollar nervous system challenge adventure (all of my days so far have required some kind of additional spending) —small acts of rebellion against the familiar that invite our systems to expand without emptying our wallets.

My son and I had ventured to the store on our usual pilgrimage—he with cash burning hopefully in his pocket, me armed with the practical weight of plastic. Two miles of well-worn asphalt stretched between us and home, a path we'd traveled countless times in our shared geography of routine.

But today, the nervous system challenge whispered: try something different.

On the return journey, I found myself steering into the unknown—or rather, the forgotten known. What revealed itself was a landscape that had been living quietly beside our hurried lives all along. An elementary school where other people's children learned their first letters. A new development birthing itself from earth. Fields pregnant with the promise of future parks and shops, holding space for dreams not yet materialized.

"Wow," my son breathed beside me, his voice carrying the wonder that comes when familiar becomes foreign. "I've never even seen most of this."

In that moment, I witnessed something beautiful: a young man who has called this city home for his entire life discovering that home contains multitudes. Here we were, inhabitants of a sprawling 400,000-person universe spanning 50.7 square miles, suddenly remembering that we are explorers who had forgotten to explore.

The nervous system, that ancient keeper of safety and survival, thrives on novelty when it's offered gently. Today's deviation from the known path was medicine—a reminder that expansion doesn't require grand gestures or expensive adventures. Sometimes it asks only that we trust the impulse to turn down an unfamiliar street.

His words awakened something in me, a recognition of how often I move through the world in service of efficiency rather than wonder. The practical parent in me knows the fastest routes, the shortcuts, the ways to compress time and maximize productivity. But today reminded me that there's wisdom in meandering, in allowing curiosity to be our compass.

I found myself making a quiet promise to this boy who is becoming a man—that we would take more driving adventures together, that we would be cartographers of our own city, mapping not just streets but moments of shared discovery. That sometimes the destination matters less than the willingness to get lost and find ourselves in the process.

The nervous system remembers: safety can be found not only in the familiar, but in the gentle expansion of what we call home. Today we gave ourselves the gift of novelty, and in return, our city revealed itself as larger, more mysterious, and more generous than we had allowed ourselves to imagine.

Sometimes the most profound journeys happen when we simply choose to take the long way home.