Changing Direction

THE LADY AT THE LIQUOR STORE turned out to be quite a reader, so since I saw her often anyway, she recommended books to me. One day she threw a blue paperback through the rear window of my car, which was fortunately rolled down, and said: "here, read this". A few months later, I did. It was a novel called "The Street Lawyer", by John Grisham, about a hot shot successful wealthy corporate attorney who gives up the rich life in order to provide legal services to homeless people. A truly inspiring story. Things like that happen in real life too. People change directions, suddenly. There is a wall street corporate type who decided to become a photographer, and began taking pictures of drug addicts and prostitutes in the Bronx, New York, at the other end of the city, far from the wealth of wall street. His purpose you can guess; by shedding light on the plight of the drug addicts and the prostitues, he is shedding light on the conditions which create these phenomena, conditions such as poverty and lack of opportunity. Our wall street corporate type turned hero understands the profound truth of "there but for the grace of God go I". A change of direction can be a shocking experience, but it happens all the time, among individuals, and among large groups and organizations. Some Americans may be familiar with the Auburn University football team, and the Boston Red Sox baseball team, both of whom were losing teams, then suddenly became winning teams. The entire human race has the ability, and the opportunity to change direction, as we enter a new year filled with nothing but the opportunity to solve all our problems. The reason the human race needs to change direction is that the direction it is going now is way off course, leading to disaster, extinction. But disaster is not inevitable, and opportunities to change course are constant. The answers we seek are all around us. That fact alone should increase our chances of finding them.