Anyone who lives in Bengaluru knows that a 10 km journey can sometimes feel like a small expedition. The same road can take 30 minutes one day and more than an hour the next. Google Maps has basically become a part of daily life here.
I travel between Koramangala and Marathahalli almost every day. Usually I have two options. The Outer Ring Road, or ORR, and the Intermediate Ring Road, or IRR.
Today, when I left Koramangala, both routes were showing more than 1.5 hours. On ORR, the traffic seemed to be closer to the end of the route. On IRR, it was jammed almost right at the beginning. So I decided to take ORR. I thought maybe if I got through the first part, the traffic would ease by the time I was three-fourths of the way there.
It didn't.
I kept crawling along and after some time I realised there was no point just sitting there and hoping the traffic would suddenly disappear. But I had already come quite far on ORR. Going back and starting again on IRR felt even more frustrating.
At some point, I opened Google Maps again just to see if there was anything else I could do. That's when I noticed a tiny road connecting ORR to IRR. I had never really noticed it before. It was barely a kilometre long and it connected the part of ORR that was completely stuck to a section of IRR where the traffic was actually moving.
So I took it.
Within a few minutes, I was out of the jam and moving again.
What stayed with me was that the road had probably been there all along. I had travelled these roads so many times and never noticed it. Google Maps had never really brought it to my attention either. I only saw it when I was stuck and actually started looking for another way.
It made me think about how often we do the same thing in life. We look at the obvious choices in front of us and assume those are our only options. Either we keep going even when something clearly isn't working because we've already invested so much into it, or we think the only other option is to turn around completely and start again.
Maybe there is another way that we haven't thought about yet.
It doesn't always have to mean making some huge change. Sometimes it could be approaching a problem differently. Sometimes it could be having a conversation we have been avoiding, setting a boundary, asking someone for help, learning something new or simply allowing ourselves to do things differently from what we have always done.
I kept thinking about this while driving home. There are so many situations where we feel stuck because we have already come too far to turn back. We keep looking at the traffic in front of us and wondering how long we have to sit there.
Maybe sometimes we just need to look at the map again.
That little road didn't change where I wanted to go. I still wanted to get to Marathahalli. It just gave me another way to get there.
Maybe life is like that too. We don't always have to change the destination. Sometimes we just need to find another route.
There may be a small road we haven't noticed yet. And sometimes, that is all we need to start moving again.
