Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone: The Saturday I Took the Long Way Home
A fictional story about courage, responsibility and the unexpected joy of trying something new.
The Saturday I Took the Long Way Home
On the morning my life began to change, I was arguing with a woman about a stapler.
It was not even a good stapler. It had lost its rubber base and needed to be struck twice before it worked. But it belonged on my desk, beside the receipt book, and Mrs. Bassey had borrowed it without asking.
“Daniel,” she said, watching me search beneath her newspaper, “you are thirty-four years old. Please behave accordingly.”
I found it behind her mug. “It is about respect.”
“Of course.”
Back at my desk, I aligned the stapler with the receipt book. Then I opened a spreadsheet I had opened every weekday for eleven years.
Outside, rain gathered over Yola. Inside, the ceiling fan made its familiar clicking sound. At twelve, someone would complain about the electricity. At one, we would eat. At four, I would go home, stopping at the same shop for bread.
There was nothing wrong with my life that I could explain without sounding ungrateful.
I had a dependable job at a building materials company. My rent was paid. My mother received money from me every month. My wife, Miriam, still put the largest piece of meat on my plate when she thought I was not looking.
I owned three good pairs of shoes and had never borrowed money to attend a wedding.
These were achievements. Where I came from, nobody dismissed them.
Yet some mornings, before I opened my eyes, I felt a heaviness that sleep did not remove. I would lie still, listening to Miriam move around the room, and wish for a small illness. Nothing serious. Just enough fever to excuse me from another day that looked exactly like the previous one.
My phone vibrated beside the stapler.
It was a message from Sadiq, an old school friend who believed every invitation could be improved by sending seven voice notes.
Come with us on Saturday. We are taking books to a school outside town. They need somebody to photograph the visit. Your camera still works, abi?
I typed that I was busy.
Then I looked at my calendar.
Saturday contained one entry: Buy washing powder.
I sent the excuse anyway.
That evening, Miriam found me polishing shoes I would not wear until Monday.
“Sadiq called,” she said.
“That man talks too much.”
“He says you refused to come.”
“I have things to do.”
She looked at the shoes, then at me. There was no accusation in her expression, which somehow made it worse.
“You used to take photographs of everything,” she said.
“I still do.”
“Receipts do not count.”
I laughed because she wanted me to. Then she sat beside me and rested her hand on my knee.
“Go out for one day, Daniel. The house will still be here when you return.”
My camera lived in a bag at the top of our wardrobe, wrapped in a faded shirt.
I had bought it at twenty-three with money saved from tutoring students. During our courtship, Miriam used to complain that I photographed her hands more often than her face. I liked how they moved when she explained something. I liked her concentration when she peeled oranges without breaking the skin.
Back then, I wanted to tell stories with pictures.
Then my father became ill. Hospital bills arrived. The building materials job became available through my uncle. I took it with relief and told myself photography could wait.
Waiting became a habit. Eventually, I stopped noticing I was doing it.
On Saturday, I charged the camera battery and changed my shirt three times. I considered calling Sadiq to say I had stomach pain. At the last minute, Miriam handed me a bottle of water and pushed me gently towards the door.
“If you hate it,” she said, “you can come back and complain to me.”
Sadiq was waiting beside a hired bus with six volunteers, several cartons of books, and the confidence of a man who had forgotten something important.
The important thing turned out to be petrol money.
We contributed what we could and left forty minutes late.
I sat beside the window, holding my camera bag between my knees. A young woman introduced herself as Hauwa. She coordinated the reading project and was trying to untangle a roll of masking tape with her teeth.
“Are you our photographer?”
“Only for today,” I said quickly.
She smiled. “Today is what we need.”
The road grew narrower as we travelled. Shops gave way to fields. Rainwater shone in shallow hollows, and children waved at the bus with an enthusiasm I found almost embarrassing. I could not remember the last time I had been pleased enough about anything to wave both hands.
At the school, the headteacher welcomed us beneath a tree because the classroom roof had begun leaking again.
There were no dramatic speeches. We carried books. We moved benches. Sadiq discovered that enthusiasm was not a substitute for upper body strength and dropped a carton on his foot.
For the first hour, I photographed from a distance.
Then a girl in a green dress stood directly in front of me.
“Why are you hiding?” she asked.
“I am taking pictures.”
“From there?”
Her name was Raliya. She was ten and had the steady gaze of someone who expected sensible answers from adults.
She took my sleeve and led me towards three children sharing a book on a bench.
“This one is better,” she said.
She was right.
By noon, I had red dust on my trousers and had forgotten to check my phone.
The children wanted photographs of everything: a lizard, a cracked football, a boy who claimed he could stand on his head. I showed them how to look through the viewfinder. Raliya photographed her teacher laughing, then insisted the teacher should see it immediately.
“She does not know her face does that,” she told me.
I began listening before I raised the camera. I asked permission. I learned names. When a boy refused to be photographed, I lowered it, and we spent ten minutes discussing why goalkeepers were the most important people in football.
Something in me loosened.
It was not happiness exactly. Happiness sounded too simple for the mixture of attention, nervousness, and pleasure I felt. I was useful, but nobody knew my job title. I was making mistakes, but nobody expected me to have finished learning.
When the rain came, we rushed the books indoors. Water entered through three holes in the roof, and children placed buckets beneath them with practised efficiency.
I stood by the doorway and took a photograph of Raliya holding a book beneath her dress to keep it dry.
Afterwards, I asked what she had chosen.
“A story about a woman who fixes an aeroplane.”
“Do you want to fix aeroplanes?”
“Maybe. I have not tried it yet.”
She said this without smiling, then ran to show her friend.
On the journey home, everyone slept except the driver and me.
I kept looking through the photographs. Some were blurred. Some were poorly framed. But several contained something I recognised from years ago: the feeling of having seen a moment properly before it disappeared.
Then I started crying.
Quietly at first, with my face towards the window. I was grateful everyone was asleep. I could not have explained why a day of carrying books and kneeling in dust had left me feeling both younger and terribly late.
I thought about the girl saying she had not tried it yet.
I thought about eleven years of telling people I was not the adventurous type.
Had I discovered that about myself, or had I simply repeated it until nobody invited me anywhere?
When I reached home, Miriam opened the door and stepped back.
“You look terrible.”
“I know.”
“Was it bad?”
I shook my head.
She waited while I removed my muddy shoes.
“It was so good,” I said, “that I am angry.”
“With who?”
I put the camera on the table.
“I think with myself.”
On Monday, the office seemed smaller.
The fan clicked. The printer jammed. Someone complained about the electricity exactly when I expected them to.
I wanted to shake everybody.
Instead, I entered delivery figures and felt ashamed of my impatience. Mrs. Bassey had a son in university and a mother who needed medicine. My colleagues were not foolish because they had come to work. Neither had I been foolish for accepting the job.
Still, by lunchtime I had searched for photography courses, travel assignments, camera prices, and a phrase I had never typed before: how to change your life at thirty-four.
The internet was full of people standing beside mountains, advising strangers to resign.
For three days, I found them persuasive.
I prepared a resignation letter and saved it on my phone. I imagined handing it to my manager while saying something memorable. In every version, he looked astonished by my courage.
In reality, I knew he would ask who had reconciled the supplier accounts.
On Thursday, I showed Miriam the letter.
She read it twice.
“Have you been offered another job?”
“No.”
“Do you have paying photography work?”
“Not yet.”
She placed the phone carefully on the table.
“Then what happens next month?”
Her question irritated me because it was reasonable.
“I thought you wanted me to do something different.”
“I do.”
“Now I am trying, and you are afraid.”
Miriam leaned back. The room became very quiet.
“You are allowed to be excited,” she said. “You are not allowed to turn me into the enemy because I asked about rent.”
I stared at the floor.
She had supported us during the months after my father's funeral when I could barely answer the phone. She had never mocked the camera in the wardrobe. Yet one good Saturday had been enough for me to mistake her caution for a wish to keep me small.
“I am sorry,” I said.
She nodded, still hurt.
We ate dinner with the television off. Afterwards, we opened our savings notebook.
The figures were less inspiring than the mountain photographs, but they belonged to us.
We agreed on six months. I would keep my job, practise seriously, and take small assignments on weekends. We would protect our household savings. Before spending money on equipment, I would learn to use what I already owned.
Then Miriam pulled another notebook from her bag.
Inside were sketches of dresses.
“Since we are discussing things we keep postponing,” she said.
My first paid assignment was a birthday party for a five-year-old who spent most of the afternoon refusing to smile.
His mother wanted photographs that looked like pictures she had found online: soft light, coordinated clothing, happy children sitting still.
What she had was a crowded compound at two in the afternoon, a generator beside the cake table, and fourteen children fighting over a plastic trumpet.
I promised more than I understood.
Halfway through the party, my battery died.
I had no spare.
While it charged in the neighbour's sitting room, the child cut his cake. Sadiq photographed it on his phone, and I spent the next ten minutes wishing the ground would accept applications for disappearance.
The mother paid me less than we had agreed. I could not honestly argue.
At home, I put the camera bag beneath the bed.
“Finished?” Miriam asked.
“Maybe.”
She was pinning fabric on a borrowed dress form. A measuring tape hung around her neck.
“There is rice in the pot.”
I had expected encouragement. Her calm annoyed me.
“You are not going to say anything?”
“You have decided your entire future after one birthday party. I thought perhaps you needed food first.”
I ate two plates.
The next morning, I wrote down everything that had gone wrong. There were eleven items. None said I was too old. None said people like me should remain in offices forever.
They said things like carry a spare battery and explain what is possible before accepting money.
Hauwa introduced me to a photographer called Uncle Peter, though he was unrelated to everyone who called him that.
He examined my photographs without praise.
“You like faces,” he said.
“Yes.”
“But sometimes you are frightened of the people wearing them.”
He took me along to a naming ceremony and made me carry equipment. For six hours, I watched him greet relatives, shift chairs, find shade, and calm an exhausted mother.
On the way home, he asked what I had learned.
“Photography involves more talking than I expected.”
“Most work does.”
I assisted him on three more Saturdays. He paid a little, corrected a lot, and taught me to check my equipment before leaving home.
My second assignment went better.
My third client complained about the price.
My fourth recommended me to her sister.
Slowly, the excitement of imagining a different life became the less glamorous satisfaction of learning how to live it.
Not everybody welcomed the change.
My elder brother, Victor, called after seeing photographs I had posted online.
“You are becoming a cameraman?”
“I am learning photography.”
“What is the difference?”
“At the moment, probably confidence.”
He did not laugh.
Victor had helped pay my school fees. He had worked jobs he hated so the younger children could finish school. When he spoke about security, he spoke from experience, and I could not dismiss him as someone who simply lacked vision.
“People are looking for stable employment,” he said. “You have it. Be careful.”
“I am being careful.”
“That is what people say before they do something foolish.”
After the call, I felt twelve years old.
I almost deleted the photographs.
Instead, I called my mother.
She listened while I explained the assignments, the savings plan, the courses I watched after work. Then she asked whether I was still eating properly.
“Yes, Mama.”
“And Miriam?”
“She is fine.”
“Then send me the photograph of that woman with the sewing machine. Your aunt wants to see it.”
I laughed. “You are not worried?”
“I am your mother. I can worry while you do things.”
Later, she told me something I had never heard.
Before marrying my father, she had wanted to train as a nurse. Her own father became ill, money disappeared, and she stayed home to help. By the time another opportunity came, she had two children.
“Do you regret it?” I asked.
She took so long to answer that I thought the connection had failed.
“Some parts,” she said. “Other parts gave me you.”
For weeks, I had been looking back at my life as though it were a room full of wrong turns. Her answer stopped me.
The job had helped me care for my father. It had paid for my sister's final examinations. It had given Miriam and me our first home.
I could want something new without pretending everything behind me had been a mistake.
That evening, I opened an old folder of photographs.
There was my father beneath the mango tree, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck. My sister holding her admission letter. Miriam asleep on a bus, sunlight lying across her cheek.
I had not wasted every year.
But I had become too comfortable letting the years decide for me.
In August, Hauwa asked me to return to the school.
The reading project wanted a small collection of photographs and interviews for a community exhibition. They could cover transport and pay a modest fee.
This time, I asked questions before agreeing. Who would use the pictures? Would parents and teachers be consulted? Could the children see the prints? Hauwa answered patiently, and we planned the visit together.
Raliya recognised me before I reached the classroom.
“The hiding photographer!”
“I have improved.”
“We will see.”
Over four visits, I photographed reading sessions, parents repairing desks, and a teacher cycling home with exercise books tied to the back of his bicycle.
I also listened.
The headteacher talked about attendance during planting season. One mother described learning to read beside her daughter. A boy asked whether the exhibition would include his drawing of a goalkeeper with six arms.
“He would never concede,” he explained.
Raliya wanted to photograph her grandmother, who sold groundnuts beneath a patched umbrella.
We went together after school. Her grandmother straightened her wrapper and asked whether the photograph would make her look rich.
“No,” Raliya said. “It will make you look like you.”
Her grandmother laughed so suddenly that Raliya nearly missed the picture.
Watching them, I felt that same bright attention I had felt on the first visit. But it was steadier now. I knew where my spare battery was. I understood that feeling inspired did not excuse poor preparation.
Then my manager called.
A supplier dispute needed resolving. A delivery had been entered under the wrong account, and only I knew how to trace it quickly.
I stepped away and spent twenty minutes on the phone.
By the time I returned, the grandmother had packed her tray. The light had changed. Raliya was sitting on a stone, waiting.
“Your work?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I thought this was your work.”
I had no easy answer.
That night, the company offered me a promotion.
More money. More responsibility. Occasional Saturdays.
For eleven years, I would have accepted before the sentence was finished.
Now I asked for a week.
My manager looked at me as though I had asked to borrow his house.
“Is something wrong?”
“No,” I said, then corrected myself. “Nothing is wrong here. I need to think about what I can commit to.”
He nodded slowly.
Walking home, I realised my hands were shaking.
The promotion would have solved several problems.
We could replace our unreliable refrigerator. We could increase our savings. I could stop pretending I did not notice the cracks in the soles of my best shoes.
It would also place the busiest part of my new work under the control of my old work.
I drew columns on paper. Money. Time. Travel. Training. Household costs.
Nothing in the columns told me how to measure the way I felt after an afternoon of photographing people.
Nothing captured the relief of knowing my salary would arrive.
Miriam sat across from me, removing a badly sewn sleeve from a dress.
“What would you choose if nobody praised you?” she asked.
I looked up.
“For the promotion, people will congratulate you. For leaving, some people will call you brave. Forget both groups for a moment.”
I watched her cut the thread.
“I want time,” I said.
“For what, exactly?”
“To see whether I can become good at this.”
She nodded. “Then ask for that.”
The next day, I went to my manager with a proposal. I would decline the promotion and train a colleague to handle the supplier accounts. After three months, if the arrangement worked, I wanted a shorter working week with reduced pay.
He refused.
Not angrily. He simply said the company needed somebody available throughout the week.
I went home discouraged.
For several days, I considered accepting the promotion after all. I was tired of uncertainty. Tired of improving slowly. Tired of wondering whether wanting more from life was a respectable ambition or an expensive form of restlessness.
Then the photographs for the exhibition came back from the printer.
I spread them across our sitting room floor.
Miriam stood in the doorway, still wearing the dress she had finally finished.
“Daniel,” she said softly.
I knew what she meant.
They were not perfect. But they were mine, and they were better than anything I had made six months earlier.
On the floor was evidence that I could change through effort, however slowly.
I did not resign the next morning.
Instead, I began applying for other accounting work with fewer hours. I contacted small businesses that needed help keeping records. I asked Uncle Peter about regular assistant work.
If the arrangement I needed did not exist at my company, I would have to build it elsewhere.
For the first time, searching frightened me less than staying exactly where I was.
The exhibition nearly failed because of rain.
Hauwa had arranged to use the courtyard of a community centre. By three in the afternoon, dark clouds had gathered, and the caretaker insisted the indoor hall was unavailable.
“There is a meeting,” he said.
“Whose meeting?” Hauwa asked.
He disappeared to investigate.
When he returned, we learned that the meeting had been cancelled two days earlier.
We carried everything inside.
One display board collapsed. Somebody forgot the extension cable. The refreshments arrived in a taxi whose driver refused to help unload them because nobody had mentioned stairs.
By opening time, my shirt was soaked with sweat.
I had invited my colleagues, my family, and three potential clients. Suddenly, I wanted none of them to come.
People could dislike work I cared about. They could walk past it without stopping. Until that evening, I had protected myself from that possibility by keeping almost everything I loved private.
Mrs. Bassey arrived first.
She walked slowly along the photographs, reading every caption.
Then she stopped beside me.
“So this is why you no longer fight over office equipment.”
“I was hoping you had forgotten.”
“Never.”
She squeezed my arm and moved on.
My mother came with Victor. Miriam wore her finished dress, and when two women asked where she had bought it, I watched her hesitate before saying, “I made it.”
Something in her face changed when they asked for her number.
Raliya arrived with her teacher and grandmother. Her photograph had its own place on the wall, with her name beneath it.
She stood in front of it for a long time.
“You put my name.”
“You took the picture.”
She touched the printed label with one finger, then ran to bring her grandmother.
Hauwa asked me to speak.
I had prepared notes. The notes became useless the moment I faced the room.
I looked at the children, at my mother, at Miriam standing near the back.
“Six months ago,” I began, “I nearly missed meeting these people because I wanted to stay home and buy washing powder.”
The room laughed.
After that, I managed.
I spoke about the school, the reading project, and the people who had welcomed me. I introduced Raliya as a photographer, and she sat straighter in her chair.
When I finished, Victor was clapping.
Later, he asked if I could photograph his daughter's graduation.
“You will have to pay,” I said.
“Now you sound serious.”
Leaving the company was quieter than I had imagined.
By then, I had secured bookkeeping work for two small businesses and regular days assisting Uncle Peter. Photography assignments remained unpredictable, but our savings had grown enough to give us some room.
Miriam and I checked the figures several times. We agreed when we would review the arrangement and what we would cut if income fell.
Then I handed in my notice.
My manager read it, asked about the supplier accounts, and wished me well.
No music played. Nobody accused me of throwing my life away. The printer jammed while I was explaining the filing system to my replacement.
On my last afternoon, Mrs. Bassey presented me with a new stapler.
Everyone laughed.
I laughed too, then unexpectedly had to look away.
These people had attended my wedding. They had contributed money when my father died. I had spent months describing the office to myself as though nothing good had ever happened there.
Leaving did not make it meaningless.
At home, I placed the stapler on my small worktable beside the camera.
The first Monday of my new arrangement was unpleasant.
I woke early, dressed, and had nowhere to report until eleven. By eight, I was convinced I had ruined everything.
Freedom, I discovered, could feel remarkably like unemployment before breakfast.
I made a schedule. I sent invoices. I edited photographs. I washed the breakfast plates because Miriam had a client coming for a fitting.
Some weeks went well.
Other weeks brought late payments, cancellations, and the familiar temptation to compare my untidy progress with strangers' polished lives.
There were evenings when I missed the certainty of my old salary so badly that I opened job advertisements without telling anyone.
Eventually, I told Miriam.
“You can apply,” she said.
“Would that mean I failed?”
She looked genuinely puzzled.
“It would mean you applied for a job.”
I sat with that answer for a while.
I had turned change into another examination I must never fail. Even after leaving the office, I was still looking for a perfect choice that would protect me from doubt.
There was no such choice.
There was only the work of paying attention, making adjustments, and admitting when something needed to change again.
Once I understood that, I slept better.
One evening, I came home to find Miriam sitting beside her sewing machine with a dress folded in her lap. A customer had rejected it. The woman said the neckline was wrong, though she had approved it at the fitting, and wanted her deposit returned immediately.
“Maybe I should leave all this,” Miriam said.
I began assembling an encouraging speech. Halfway through the first sentence, she raised her hand.
“Please do not turn me into one of your lessons.”
I closed my mouth.
We sat together while a neighbour's radio played through the wall. After a while, I asked whether she wanted tea. She nodded. When I returned, she had unfolded the dress across the table.
“Look at the lining,” she said.
I looked.
“It took me three evenings to get that right.”
The stitches were so small and even that I had to lean closer to see them. I knew nothing about lining, but I knew what three evenings meant. I remembered her working while I edited photographs, both of us occasionally asking the other to switch on the fan.
“It is good work,” I said.
“I know.”
Her answer surprised me. Then I understood that the rejection had hurt without persuading her she was useless. She needed time to feel disappointed. She did not need me to hurry her towards optimism.
We discussed the customer after tea. Miriam checked her messages, found the approved design, and wrote a calm reply offering an alteration. She decided what she could reasonably change and what she would charge for.
Then she switched off the machine.
“Come,” she said. “We have been sitting indoors all week.”
We walked to a roadside food stall and ordered more suya than our budget permitted. Across the road, a boy was learning to ride a bicycle while his older sister ran behind him, holding the seat.
Every few metres, he shouted that she must not let go.
Every few metres, she promised she would not.
Then he looked back, discovered her standing several steps away, and immediately rode into a shallow gutter.
We rushed over, but he was already getting up. His knees were dusty. His sister retrieved the bicycle, trying unsuccessfully not to laugh.
“You left me!” he accused her.
“You were riding!”
He considered this. Then he climbed back on.
Miriam slipped her hand into mine as we walked home.
“You are going to make that a lesson, aren't you?”
“I am trying very hard not to.”
She laughed, and I realised how much I had missed simply being outside with her, without a plan to improve either of our lives. We bought oranges from a woman closing her stall and carried them home in my camera bag.
For once, that was enough.
A year after the first school visit, Sadiq invited me on another trip.
This time, I was the one asking what time we would leave.
The school had a repaired section of roof and a cupboard for the books. Raliya had grown taller. She examined my camera bag before greeting me properly.
“Spare battery?”
“Two.”
“Good.”
She had been taking photographs with her teacher's old phone. Most were ordinary in the best possible way: her grandmother measuring groundnuts, her brother asleep beside his homework, rain gathering at the edge of a roof.
She showed me a blurred photograph of a chicken.
“This one refused to cooperate.”
“I have worked with people like that.”
We sat beneath the tree while the younger children chose books.
“Are you still fixing numbers?” she asked.
“Sometimes.”
“And taking pictures?”
“Yes.”
She nodded, satisfied that adults were finally becoming capable of doing more than one thing.
On the bus home, I scrolled through photographs of the past year.
There was Miriam beside a rack of dresses. My mother laughing at something outside the frame. Uncle Peter asleep in a chair after a wedding. Mrs. Bassey holding the new stapler during my farewell gathering.
There were unsuccessful photographs too, saved because they reminded me what to practise.
I thought about the man who had cried against this same window a year earlier.
He had believed that feeling so alive must mean everything before it had been wrong.
I understood him. New pleasure can make old unhappiness suddenly visible. Once you discover that you can wake with interest, it becomes difficult to explain why you accepted waking with dread for so long.
But I wanted to be kinder to him now.
He had done what he knew. He had cared for people. He had survived hard years. He had mistaken some fears for facts, certainly, but he had also packed his camera and got on the bus.
That counted.
When I reached our street, I asked the driver to stop near the junction.
Miriam had sent a message saying we needed bread.
The usual shop was straight ahead. Another road curved past the market, where the evening light was falling across the stalls.
I checked the time. I had no appointment waiting, no urgent call, no reason to hurry past everything.
So I called my wife.
“I will be a little longer,” I said. “I am taking the long way.”
“Bring bread,” she said.
“I remember.”
Then I lifted my camera and walked.