Always take a shortcut

"Always Take the Shortcut"

I remember the day I got that life-changing advice. It was a family barbecue, the sun was scorching, and Uncle Jim, sipping on his third beer, leaned over and slurred, “Listen, kid. Always take the shortcut. Life’s too short for long roads.”Now, let’s be clear: Uncle Jim isn’t exactly a role model. But for some reason, his words stuck. Maybe it was the beer, or maybe it was the midlife crisis I felt creeping up at 29.

Either way, the next morning, I woke up with a new mantra: Always take the shortcut. It started small. On my morning drive to work, I decided to ditch my usual route and cut through the backroads. Shortcut, I thought. Brilliant idea. Twenty minutes later, I was stuck behind a tractor going 10 miles an hour while the “long” way breezed by without a hitch. “Just great,” I muttered, watching cows casually graze as I cursed Uncle Jim’s wisdom.

But I wasn’t discouraged. That was just one hiccup, right? I mean, surely shortcuts work in other aspects of life. Like cooking. Why follow recipes when you can eyeball everything? If the instructions say simmer for 20 minutes, surely 10 minutes on high heat gets the job done faster, right?

Spoiler: it doesn’t. I learned this the hard way when my chicken came out as tough as my ex’s love life or as Marian Keyes once said, rough as a badger’s ass. I’m still not sure what that means, but I can tell you this: it’s rough. By the end of dinner, I was chewing so hard I gave myself a headache, and my dog, Charlie, refused to touch it. When your dog who eats literally everything, turns your meal down, you know you’ve failed.

But hey, I wasn’t giving up on Uncle Jim yet. I decided to apply his “shortcut” wisdom to my dating life. Why spend weeks getting to know someone when you can just jump into a relationship? After all, people speed-date, right? How bad could it be?Let me tell you how bad. Three days into my romance with Brad (met him on an app, of course), he was already discussing names of our future children. By the end of the week, he was sending me Pinterest boards of wedding venues. Shortcut to crazy, that’s what I found. I ghosted him faster than a Wi-Fi outage.

You’d think I would have learnt my lesson by now. But no. I decided to give one final shot at shortcut glory. My best friend, Lucy, had been begging me to join her on a weekend hiking trip for months. And you know what I said? “Sure, but let’s skip the marked trail. I know a shortcut.”Big mistake.We started off great, cutting through what looked like a simple woodland path.

Thirty minutes in, I was feeling smug. Lucy, not so much.“Are you sure this is the right way?” she asked, eyeing the rapidly thickening forest.“Positive,” I lied, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in my gut as the path narrowed and the trees seemed to close in on us.Two hours later, we were lost. Not just “where’s the trail” lost, but “we’re going to have to live here now” lost. Lucy had given up all pretence of being polite. “This is what happens when you follow Uncle Jim’s advice,” she snapped, swatting at a mosquito the size of a pigeon.“I’m sure we’ll find our way back,” I said, though my confidence had long evaporated with the last of my phone signal.Long story short? We didn’t. Three hours, a lot of swearing, and one near-death experience with what I’m sure was a bear later, we finally stumbled out of the woods. And you know what we saw? The original trail. Not ten feet from where we started.

That was the day I decided Uncle Jim’s wisdom was probably best left at the barbecue. Because if life has taught me anything, it’s this: shortcuts? They’ll get you nowhere fast. You have to work hard for the things you want to achieve, have patience and keep trying, never give up and hahaha “Never take a shortcut”.