I have recently become obsessed with shortcuts. I have started noticing them and taking pictures of them. And when you start looking you see them everywhere, lines between anywhere and somewhere else. They cut across weedy vacant lots, school fields, run parallel to roads, and mostly connect two places I don’t go. We use them so often when are children but when we grow up we seem to just get out of the habit – or maybe we just start caring about our shoes.
The thing I love about shortcuts now is how very winding they are. By definition they should be the shortest cut – as the crow flies at the very least. But they aren’t - they wander. We proudly live our lives in boxes and straight lines and yet here, in this moment when we are trying to save time and distance, we meander. I love that all of the feet it took to create the path were responding to the same subtle dips, to roots and bunches of grass. It reminds me, in the middle of the city, that we are animals. I love this evidence of the freedom and mess we allow ourselves when we are unselfconscious – like during sex and laughter.
