A Better Way from Point A to Point B
By: Taylor Coe
Tags: Metaphor, Planning, Habits

One thing I love about a fresh snowfall is the “desire paths” that appear the next morning.

Desire paths are those unpaved trails that often appear in parks and public spaces, either shortcuts that cut off part of an existing route or where there are no existing routes. Sometimes, landscape designers will actually open a new park without any paths and wait to see how people move through the space, only then paving over the desire paths that emerge. There’s a beautiful simplicity to it, designing to how people actually move from Point A to Point B.

The park and adjacent open space in my neighborhood is a case study of existing routes and desire paths. As the paved Ralston Creek Trail wends its way through suburban Arvada, desire paths shoot off from it in all directions, either bisecting the wide, meandering loops of the paved trail or leaping out into the open space with a studied aimlessness. Well-trod, these secondary paths often seem as established as the paved trail they jump off of.

But when it snows, this network of interconnected pathways vanishes. With established paths gone, new ones emerge, freshly trampled by suburbanites seeking Point B from Point A and forced to blaze a new path through the snow.

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The fresh snow frees us from those preconceived paths. And while sometimes we follow the old paths underneath, we can’t always follow them on purpose.

Life is filled with little journeys from Point A to Point B, many of them less obvious than cutting off an inconvenient loop of the Ralston Creek Trail. Sometimes, those journeys are from a messy email inbox to a clean one or from the start of a meeting to its end.

Just as we develop shortcuts and preferences in moving through our neighborhood park, we do the same thing on these other journeys. This is how I respond to my emails. This is how I take meeting notes. Our minds are mini neighborhood parks, crisscrossed with paved walks and desire paths. This is how I get from Point A to Point B.

Out in the actual park, a layer of fresh snow is an opportunity to see the landscape new and then to reset old patterns and determine new paths. There are no freak snowstorms to do the same for all the little journeys that happen inside our minds.

Or are there?

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If there’s any analogue to the fresh snow in the park, it’s probably a good week-long vacation. Or a several-month disruption to your regular life. Either way, spending time outside your regular rhythms of life and then returning to them often feels like returning to a landscape that, while familiar, looks a little fuzzy. Perhaps as though it were covered in a couple inches of snow.

Too often, our return to regular life is marked by the rite of patiently retrodding the exact paths that were there before. Where do I file this type of document again? How do I like my coffee? In the race to return to old habits, we cannot spare a moment to gaze out over the snowy landscape and question whether another path might make more sense. What if I got to Point B by following the creek instead of this line of trees? What if I put off answering my emails until late morning instead of diving in at 8am?

Such questions are only possible with some “fresh snow” to obscure the well-trod paths that have been placed there.

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As the US begins a massive roll-out of vaccines, the end of the COVID era is finally lurching into view. That end won’t be this January or February, but it will likely be some point in the next year. And when that time comes, we will return to some semblance of “regular life.”

And once that happens, a fresh layer of “snow” will await us, covering up the paths we took along various journeys. When that day comes-when I start commuting back to the office, when we begin to host friends, when we travel-I hope we all have the patience to survey the still-snowy landscape and ask whether there might be a better way to get from Point A to Point B.