A Roundabout Way of Looking at Things

By Audrey Stallsmith

Many of us worry about the new roundabout that recently opened at the intersection of a couple nearby roads, that intersection having had what we considered a perfectly adequate stoplight before. After all, stoplights are easy. You stop for red, go on green, or try to sneak through at the last minute of the indecisive yellow.

Roundabouts, by contrast, are a maze of multiple lanes which go around in circles. Convinced that the state spent six million dollars to make things more complicated, some people avoid that intersection altogether now. I, unfortunately, can’t do that without meandering ridiculously out of my way.

This country girl usually only “goes to town” once every two weeks. But I have to accomplish much during that afternoon, which “back in the good old days” usually included me breezing through that intersection at least three or four times.    

I actually had enough problems when the roundabout still was under construction. One day I followed the driver in front of me through the maze of orange cones, assuming he probably was a townie who understood it better than I did. When he veered into what turned out to be the wrong lane, a bunch of construction workers started yelling at him. I fortunately still had time to brake abruptly and yank my car over into the only other lane available. And everybody else trailed after me—probably mistakenly assuming that I knew what I was doing.

My point here is that stoplights are easy for us country bumpkins simply because we know how they work. No doubt the roundabout will be equally easy once we figure it out. But, in the meantime, there is going to be a painful learning process. Since I am not a fast thinker, I probably will have other drivers rather than construction workers yelling at me as I go round and round. . .and round and round. . .

Painful learning processes are a part of life—or should be. M. Scott Peck holds that many of the psychoses that people develop are simply their attempt to bypass pain, as some drivers are bypassing that intersection. Granted, sometimes we can learn the right route from other people’s mistakes, as I did from that unfortunate driver in front of me. But usually we have to take the flack of failure ourselves a few times to actually get anywhere.

Of course, our conception of getting somewhere may be flawed if we think that means eventually navigating our way out of pain. As Peck points out, the better Christians we become, the more conscious we become of other people’s pain—which increases our own. “The more healthy and “saved” and civil you are,” he writes in A World Waiting To Be Born, “the more it will hurt.” But, he reassures us, “simultaneously—paradoxically—you will experience more joy.” 

Another book I’ve been reading concerns a young wife whose 30-year-old husband experienced a massive stroke. She concurs with Peck that, to reach the happy ending, you have to go straight through  pain rather than trying to bypass it. Even when that pain involves having to take care of your first baby and a recovering husband both at once, with no guarantees of how much that husband actually will recover.    

In comparison to that, a new roundabout only is a minor trial. It reminds me, though, that we sometimes can get stuck going round and round in the same problem or set of problems, simply because we can’t figure out which is the right off ramp. In that circumstance, any of the off ramps probably are going to get us further than the continued circling. 

No, I’m not suggesting that you solve—say, a difficult marriage—by leaving it. I’m positing that sometimes you have to try something new to get any movement at all. Sometimes that new thing doesn’t have to be so much a change in circumstances as a change in your attitude towards them.

Despite reading up on traffic circles ahead of time, I suspect I just will have to use one to understand it. Fortunately, that reading did reassure me that crashes in roundabouts generally are not severe, since the circle is supposed to reduce the possibility of right-angle collisions. But they’d better not come to that conclusion until Ms-Accident-Waiting-To-Happen has had her whack at it!