By One night I was driving, deep in thought, when I made a left turn the wrong way down Main Street.
I could have continued forward, excusing my illegal action by saying that Main Street really should be a southbound road or listing reasons it should be two ways, or blaming bad lighting, or justifying my wrong turn with clever arguments.
Donna Marmorstein
Instead, I made a panicky sharp turn into the nearest parking space, backed out and headed north until I could turn legally and continue on my way.
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If you’re hemming a pair of trousers and you accidentally sew your sleeve into the hem, you don’t continue on. You rip out stitches until your sleeve is free and start again. If you keep sewing, determined to keep going forward, you’ll need to rip out even more stitches eventually.
If you’re making brownies and you mistakenly double the needed flour, you don’t just move forward with the original recipe. You recalibrate and double the other ingredients. If you continue with the original recipe, you’ll have burned brownie brumble instead of brownies.
When you come to a flooded road, you turn around. You don’t drown. You backtrack.
If you’re riding your electric scooter and you come to the edge of a steep cliff, you don’t blithely go forward.
Once, our family was driving to California. Not long after entering Wyoming, we took a wrong turn without realizing it. We traveled south for miles, thinking we were heading west. Few landmarks popped up to make our direction clear.
I kept trying to make roads and distant towns fit what I saw on the map.
After nearly an hour, we realized our mistake. If we’d kept heading south, saying, “We must move the car forward,” we’d eventually hit the Gulf of Mexico.
Backtracking is often essential.
When you’re about to step on a rattlesnake, you take a step back. You don’t shrug and make cutting remarks about why the rattlesnake needs to move first. You don’t keep moving forward, trampling the snake and risking a poisonous bite.
You might be arguing with a spouse or child when you realize you’re in the wrong. You backtrack. You might even apologize and backtrack. If you keep moving forward with wrong arguments, you could alienate the one you love and make the situation worse.
In election years, “moving forward” is the solution to everything. Rarely do you hear politicians talk about taking a step back or even sidestepping, unless it’s in a negative sense.
If you’re walking along a sidewalk and see a big pile of dog waste in your way, you sidestep. You don’t keep moving forward, plastering dog doo onto your shoe. Not intentionally anyway.
If a bicyclist zooms toward you, you sidestep. You don’t say to yourself, “I have the right of way. I’m not moving away! I’m going forward.”
You sidestep to avoid a collision in a hallway. You sidestep to keep from stomping on pets. You sidestep to break a fall.
Sidestepping carries only negative connotations these days, but it shouldn’t. And there is nothing wrong with backtracking, and not just when approaching the lip of a canyon.
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Even when two people have the same ultimate goal — peace, economic security or safety — they can consider different ways to get there.
You might need to back up and take a different route. It might even be a long detour. Or, you might need to sidestep a bit before moving on.
Rarely is pushing forward without thinking the best option.
Donna Marmorstein lives and writes in Aberdeen. Contact her at [email protected].
Donna Marmorstein
Donna Marmorstein lives and writes in Aberdeen.