When Wrong Becomes Right

Moving around Edinburgh with my friends Carolyn and Stuart regularly had me shaking my head in befuddled amusement. Right after leaving the airport, I got into their passenger’s seat?…on the driver’s side of the car! Of course, I’ve always known about Brits driving on the left side of the road, the “wrong” side of the road, but experiencing it became another thing altogether.

Coming into a rotary proved especially hairy. As Stuart would veer to the left side of the circle, every cell in me wanted to yell out, looking to protect us all from the madness. The more my perceptions got all askew, the more my instincts seemed to unravel. From what direction should I be looking for entering traffic? Where the heck are we merging to? Why are they passing on the right?

The confusion reached further than just the direction of travel as well. In the States, a white line in the middle of the road indicates all traffic moves in your direction. In other words, pick whichever lane you prefer. Not so in the UK: their white line is like our yellow line. Choose the wrong lane and what appears a spacious two-lane road could send you hurtling into oncoming traffic. (Wait–which lane is right again?)

The life-or-death stakes exist for pedestrians too. I normally and naturally look to the left before stepping off the curb to cross a street. A few heart-stopping moments in Edinburgh quickly demonstrated that that pattern of thinking could get me killed. By the end of my stay in the town, I hadn’t learned to look to the right, but I had conditioned myself to at least pause and take a moment to collect myself before crossing.

I like this kind of disorientation (as long as I don’t get offed in the process, I guess). The temporary confusion forces me to construct new pathways in my brain, firing neurons that have likely been lying dormant for years. Like crossing my arms or folding my hands in non-standard fashion, putting myself just off-balance primes me for new information. Senses come to attention and I’m awake and alert. The world looks newer, sharper.

Such tweaking also breeds humility and compassion. Driving on the “wrong” side, of course, really means driving on a different side. One colorful poster outside my classroom gets to this point with one of my favorite quotations: “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.” Who is to say which side of the road is right for driving? It’s only normal because it’s what I’m used to.

Scotland gave me another come-down later in the visit, too, this one about language. Since I’d arrived, I’d been delighting in Carolyn’s and Stuart’s Edinburgh and Glasgow accents. At times, I had to process sentences for a few extra moments to catch the meaning but more often, I just enjoyed the playful musicality and inclusion of the lilt. I found myself surprised, then, to notice a hidden prejudice. We passed the Edinburgh School for English and I chuckled inwardly to imagine Chinese or Japanese tourists heading back home speaking English with a Scottish accent. “That’s not real English,” I thought to myself. Almost as soon as I had the laughable thought, I caught myself. I asked Stuart if he’d think the same about sending them off with American accents and he admitted with a smile that, yes, that would seem a bit lamentable. My English–or even high-brow Queen’s English–only counts as one English among many versions.

I find myself more and more fascinated by this dynamic, how we push away or shrink from what’s unfamiliar or uncomfortable. When confronted with confusing information, we so often shut down rather than doubling down with greater attention or refocused effort. It’s natural and healthy to have boundaries to our world views. We have to make sense of the worlds we live in and the paths we travel most often. And challenging too much of what we know at one time can prove debilitating or even destructive. We grow fatigued and then sloppy or wobbly. Confusion leads to anxiety leads to depression.

At the same time, healthy boundaries need not wall us off from the new. In measured doses, active boundaries become good medicine. Rather than sealing ourselves against the foreign, we create centers of more intense or more conscious communication. We build marketplace bazaars with exotic goods and helpful exchanges. We develop newfound neural networks. What sometimes seems wrong–side of the road, tone of the tongue, or otherwise–often leads us to what’s right.