U-turns often lead to a better direction

When you realize you're going the wrong way, what do you do? Reverse course. Make a U-turn. I do it all the time, especially now that my wife and I both have some difficulty reading street signs.

(Typical scenario: "We're looking for Acacia Boulevard. Let me know when you spot it." drive…drive…drive "There it is!" "Where?" "Back a few blocks. I couldn't make out the sign until you were past it." grumble…U-turn …drive…drive…drive.)

Bruce Grierson wrote about "The Age of U-turns" in a recent issue of TIME magazine. It was a nice counterpoint to the oft-heard assumption that flip-flopping is a bad thing.

Sure, I could keep on driving straight down the road. But then I'd never get to my destination. Which is better: to remain true to my original course, or make an abrupt change of direction?

Grierson has written a book called "U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?" Nice title. (Excerpt can be read here.) That's happened to me several times. It happens to just about everybody.

In the secular epiphany category, I'd been happily working in the health planning/policy field for more than a dozen years. Improving the health care system (or more accurately, non-system) was a big part of my life. It meant a lot to me.

Until, all of a sudden, it didn't. I didn't plan or intend the U-turn. It simply happened. From that moment, I knew I couldn't do what I'd been doing any longer. Now I look back at some remnants of my health policy life that show up on an Amazon search and think, "That sure was a different Brian Hines back then."

I've also flip-flopped philosophically. Beliefs that I thought would forever be the foundation of my way of looking at the world (and cosmos) aren't anymore.

Again, this isn't something that I intended. As with my professional U-turn, the spiritual epiphany of "I no longer am a believer" arrived unbidden.

From the East. My experience dovetails with Grierson's conclusion:

I realized this was what almost all the U-turns had in common: people had swung around to face East. They had stopped thinking in a line and started thinking in a circle. Morality was looking less like a set of rules and more like a story, one in which they were part of an ensemble cast, no longer the star.

By "East," he means an Eastern way of looking at the world.

To Western thinking, the world is linear; you can chop it up and analyze it, and we can all work on our little part of the project independently until it's solved. The classically Eastern mind, according to Nisbett, sees things differently: the world isn't a length of rope but a vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing.

The past two Tango classes, we've been working on our promenade pivots. When done correctly (and we're a ways from this), a couple can turn 180 degrees in a single flowing motion, each person facing the opposite direction from where he or she started.

A U-turn! Link a couple of them together and you move quite a ways down the floor in an enjoyable fashion. Dance imitating life.

Comments

[ET]

Brian, I agree with you that often a U-turn is very refreshing and the best thing to do. I have had several situations in my life where my professional career too had drifted into stagnation. When that happened I quit, made a U-turn, and found another opportunity and instantly was having a good time and enjoying my work again.

However, in some cases that does not work because of so much momentum going in the wrong direction. For example; you have difficulty changing jobs because your family has roots in the community and thus a move would disrupt all of the family members. Thus you need to take a slow wide turn or else you need to find some leverage to force the U-turn.

Buckminster Fuller used an excellent metaphor for this principle of leverage. He explains that in order to turn a huge ship around, one does not go to the front or the bow and push. This would require an incredible amount of force. If you recall your basic physics you will remember Newton's first Law of motion which states:

Every body persists in a state of rest or of uniform linear motion until acted upon by some outside force.

In the case of a huge ship, the speed is pretty slow, but with all that weight the momentum, is very large. Thus Newton's first law predicts that the ship will continue in its same direction unless acted upon by some very large force.

Buckminster Fuller goes on to explain that this great outside force can be obtained through the principle of leverage. He says simply go to the back of the ship, the stern, and then push the tail around by using a rudder. By turning a rudder, into the oncoming water the boat’s own momentum, will create a pressure which sucks the rear end around. That is where the leverage is at.

Likewise in life to make a U-turn we have to find the leverage to do so. This is often most difficult. An alcoholic or a drug addict cannot just turn himself around. If you are living on a high income job and your new job has a lower income it is difficult to scale down your lifestyle.

In my life I often had to make a slow wide U-turn or in some cases find some sort of leverage in order to make my U-turn.

[Roger]

Common Sense, neutal open-mindedness create these U-turns.

I have made my share of them. Unfortunately, many came from a smack over my head. Ouch!!, some of them kinda hurt.

[Ashwin]

I haven't reached an age where I can relate to these matters, but the credit to the East, I thought was interesting, after hearing how the Bhagavad Gita is taught in Economics and the idea of linear thinking seems to be changing...

[Edward]

Just the other day I was talking with my wife about driving. She is visiting family and seems to be able to find her way around easily. JoKing I said, "So you have a bumper sticker that says, 'God is my Mapquest.'" She said "I'm not that arrogant, I just pray to get the where I'm going."

I don't do that, and I get lost a lot. But I get in a car in a strange town and say, "I wonder what I'll see this time." This means a lot of U turns. and a lot of scenery.

[renall]

Hey people Bruce may have be to wounder land in India to see the poelpe are living happily with no food and education and no hospital to take of the sick. The west have bulid them because the eastern religion don't care about anything. The spirits and the starts determinds there life. We should all do that in the west and see what will happen. The age of u turn is not to the east, you should wake up Bruce.