Detours take longer, but you see neighborhoods the highway never shows you.

Efficiency is narrow by design. The fastest route exists to skip everything that is not the destination, which is fine for a journey and less fine for a life. The unplanned stretches are where you meet people who were never on your route and pick up skills that were not on any list. Plenty of what makes someone interesting came from a year that was not part of the plan.

Stop filing an unplanned stretch under wasted while you are still in it. Then take one literal detour this week: walk home a different way, take the long road, get off a stop early. Small practice for the larger version.