Some roads are scenic roads. Others are gauntlets.

There is a particular route home that I take when I’m a little bit outside of town.

Actually, there are two options.

One is to take the highway as long as I possibly can, then take the exit toward home. The other is to get off the highway much sooner than I have to and enjoy the non-traffic, non-stressful rest of the drive.

That is what I would typically do. In theory.

Which is why I couldn’t figure this one out.

The scenic road is almost always my preference. Yet this particular scenic drive home had somehow lodged itself in my brain as a thing to avoid.

But why?

I couldn’t figure it out.

And, of course, it bothered me enough that I wouldn’t let it go.

Then it occurred to me.

That particular scenic ride home, even though it let me escape the boredom and constriction of the highway, included approximately 17 different turns, decisions, and places where things could go horribly wrong.

There were too many gauntlets.

So I had to ask myself: at what point does a scenic road become something I want to avoid?

And that is where the definition of gauntlets in my everyday life started to materialize.

Yes, I am a little bit eccentric. I like suspending disbelief, shows about time travel, medieval and fantastical themes, and so on. So yes, the word gauntlet pops into my head instead of stop sign, obstacle, or whatever more normal word someone might use.

Anyway, back to my original point.

There were too many gauntlets on this drive home. So it wasn’t scenic anymore. At least not in my brain.

The scenery was the same. But the mental and emotional feeling it gave me took away all the fun and added all the stress back in.

So then I started wondering: what exactly is a gauntlet?

It could be an annoying stop-sign intersection. A dangerous merge into traffic. An unpredictably long wait at a light that never seems to change during a certain time of day.

It could be a left-hand turn with no traffic light or stop sign, where I have absolutely no idea how long it will take me to make the turn depending on the oncoming traffic.

It could even be driving by someplace I simply don’t want to drive by.

And time matters.

The exact same spot, with the exact same scenery, might not be a gauntlet at all at one time of day and absolutely become one at another.

This is where my analytical mind starts doing what it does.

What counts as a gauntlet? How many are too many? Are some worse than others? Does an otherwise lovely road stop being scenic because it contains too many of them?

I could go on and on.

When I was younger, I probably assumed everybody thought about things like this. The older I get, the less convinced I am.

Call it what you want. I enjoy these mental tangents. That’s why I keep letting myself have them.

And this wasn’t actually the first time I had thought about gauntlets.

Years ago, my commute to work had exactly one.

It was a particularly sketchy intersection where the right-of-way wasn’t especially clear and the visibility was poor. I disliked it enough that during commuting hours I would drive five or six minutes out of my way just to avoid that one intersection.

One gauntlet.

So much for my emerging theory about how many it takes.

At first, the detour itself annoyed me because it always took longer to get to work than I thought it should.

Eventually—and it took me an embarrassingly long time to do this—I realized that if I was deliberately choosing the longer route, I needed to stop calculating my commute as though I were taking the shorter one.

If avoiding that intersection added six minutes, then those six minutes were part of my commute.

Otherwise I had eliminated the stress of the gauntlet only to replace it with the stress of being late.

Once I started accounting for the extra time, the longer drive became the better drive.

Which brings me back to that scenic road home.

The interesting thing to me is that none of this occurred to me until recently.

I have taken that road—and avoided that road—for more than eight years.

Some part of my brain had already figured out that the scenery wasn’t the only thing determining whether I enjoyed the drive. It knew that one intersection could matter more than several ordinary ones. It knew that the same road could feel different at different times of day. It knew that uncertainty mattered. It even knew that sometimes a few extra minutes were worth spending.

I just hadn’t consciously identified any of those things.

Apparently, I had been calculating gauntlets for years. I just hadn’t known they were part of the equation.