9/21/16
RMB Planes, Plans and Choices
Dear
Rita Mae Brown,
While
our California skies are letting loose the first soft rain of the season, I’m
slowly making my way through Claws and Effect and enjoying the
small town feel of it. Every chance to read is like catching up with old
friends.
In
my car I finished listening to the book on CD Smarter, Faster, Better: The
Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business. The author, Charles
Duhigg, uses stories of actual events to illustrate his points. The difference
between one flight crashing, taking with it hundreds of lives, and another
flight narrowly avoiding the same fate, is human error and human preparedness.
Other
lives and paths are examined, from saving a kidnap victim to saving the lives
of individual students in a tough neighborhood with sometime unsurmountable
challenges, and more.
Each
story details the choices made along the way, for it is in those choices that the
course is set for success or failure. Interesting how it is the early choices,
to prepare, to think through the plan, to engage in the goal, that seem
mundane, but ultimately sway the final outcome the most. For if one waits for
the choices that are made in the final moments, at the homestretch of an
endeavor, the wait is costly and the choices made at that point are too little
and too late. As with the flight that didn’t make it, lives are lost. And in
each person’s life, dreams slip away and life becomes something very different
then it could have been.
As
I drove home the other day, a car was stalled in my lane up ahead. I saw it
with just enough time to move one lane to my left. The truck directly behind
it, had parked, halfway in the line of traffic also. My guess is he found himself
stuck behind the vehicle and couldn’t go forward. As I passed, I watched the
man get out of his car to help push the vehicle. Two men were already trying to
move it enough to get it turned on a side street and off the busy avenue.
The
two men may have been friends of the driver, and so might the truck driver for
that matter. But I glanced back again through my rear view mirror to see another
man, on the opposite side of the street, pull over and run across lanes to get
to the car and help push too.
Although
they were at a slight incline, increasing the difficulty of the task, the car
moved easily with the joined force of four men. The first three were white men.
The last, who parked his car and dodged traffic to join the effort, was a black
man.
Choices.
Lending a helping hand to three men, makes one man an ambassador for all men of
color. If human nature follows its regular course, the story of how they helped
someone will be told, to each family, their children and friends.
That
one act carries a grand weight in the course of things.
Cheers,
Loraine
