We all know that the quickest way to get from one place to another is in a straight line: this is fundamental geometry. But whether it is also fundamental laziness is a question of where one wishes to go and why one is in motion in the first place. I recall an event in grade school where each student in our class was expected to run a certain distance. There was a small makeshift track on our playground chalked out with lines where the aim was to head straight for the finish line at maximum speed. Soon enough we learned which students were the fastest and which were the slowest. Fortunately, I finished as one of the faster runners. This was awarded with high fives and back pats. But, thinking back, I’m not so sure that my accomplishment was worthy of any recognition. For it’s not so much that I felt sorry for those of my classmates who were pitifully lagging behind, hunched over in defeat and out of breath. Rather, I often wonder what is so significant and competitively superior about speed. For though it wastes less time in getting there (wherever ‘there’ is) it gains no more in the waiting for others to finish.

This idea of haste and getting what one wants as quickly as possible is mirrored in modern society. I’m not one of those whose criticisms are chiefly directed towards our own current society. And while I cannot honestly make a thorough assessment one way or another concerning the variety of ways in which we human beings have lived and conducted ourselves over the centuries, I will say that if the Medieval man had had an automobile he may very well have complained just as much as we do about traffic and how long it takes to get from London to Cardiff while respecting legal speed limits. So just because we as a modern people perhaps seem more to blame for embracing such misguided values, one must remember that Pheidippides’ marathon coast-to-coast run was probably more memorable for the Greeks then, say, Aristotle’s musingly peripatetic strolls with students that seemed as meaningless as they were slow. Which one helped build Hellenistic culture and its people more is debatable, however.

The heavens have voiced their opinion on the subject of speed. For they go round and around in circles infinitely, arriving at destinations unknown that are invisible to the naked eye. Can we label those stellar bombastic balls, so full of desire and purposeful rage as failures? Perhaps we could learn a great deal from the stars that — in their own good time — circle around the universe of matter while showing us their dazzling forms.

Like the stars, a good many legendary figures have gone around the long way to make very important and inspiring journeys that we talk about and read about and dream of also one day embarking upon. Consider that tragic character Peer Gynt, from the Ibsen play of the same name. Based on the Norwegian folk hero who fought off forest trolls for the sake of dairy maids, the pathetic but praiseworthy Peer was more than once forced to go the long way around when straight would have proved faster. Gynt, in pursuit of an unruly troll that had wrapped its huge snake-like body around a cabin housing three helpless young maidens found that he had to go the long way around in order to wage battle. He soon faced adversity in the form of an unseen creature known as the Boyg. Peer physically ran into it and it would not let him pass. He ordered it to move, and all the Boyg said was, “round about.” And so he went round about, to the tune of the entire play, ending on the note of having gone round about.

Can we not relate to this? For it is in going around that we see all those things we would have missed had we gone straight on to where we thought we wanted to go. It is in the circular diversions where on the fabric of our lives there are sown the materials of character. At some point in our lives we have all run into Ibsen’s Boyg but how have we responded? Are we willing to go around in place of losing our position in the race for a much greater purpose?

The voice of Nature, of Life, of God calls out with a quiet but oftentimes boldly ominous voice, “’Round about!”

Or, just simply: “Go Around!”