I am not a nervous driver.

Passenger, yes, especially in the front seat . . . with my son (son, take note) . . . but not driver.

Regardless of my beloved’s regular back-seat encouragement (some might call it nagging) that “it’s a 30 mile zone here you know, and you’re only doing 25” – oh, how I laugh! – and an occasional tendency to slow down when I’m talking (which is a lot, obviously), I would argue that my Driving Miss Daisy moniker is a little unjustified.

But . . . I’ve had a bit of a light bulb moment quite recently.  Much as it pains me, I think I have to accept that I’ve been functioning in a driving comfort zone . . . a place of low challenge and ease that might, just might, have made me a little cautious about experimenting with my navigation, my direction-finding, my course-plotting.

In short, perhaps I have been a little nervous about trying something new.

You see, I’ve got a new job, and I’m now driving to a different place, on a different route to the one I’ve been doing for the last 11 years. And in the space of less than a few weeks, this has made me search for shortcuts, get-arounds, diversions, rat-runs, dodges . . . anything that will shave off a few minutes or a few metres of travel.

And I’m loving it. I’m venturing along boulevards that I’ve never driven, and areas of my city that I didn’t know existed.  And it’s opening up my eyes to some parts of the world I live in that I previously hadn’t spied.

But of course, my moment of revelation is not really about driving . . . it’s about a realisation that doing something a tad different, a little out of the norm, can be quite invigorating, exciting.

And I’ve been pleasantly surprised that this came as a surprise. I’m rather enjoying the stretch.