3:10 to Yuma

Ostensibly the writing here is supposed to be about our little financial adventure, maybe economics, with a little politics, personal fluff, and ax grinding thrown in, but today I will drift a bit.

When I left the office this afternoon I waited about an hour for the bus. I sipped on a lemon soda and watched the clouds and cars roll by. People were on their way to lunch, or taking walks down the quiet street trying to get in some exercise before heading back to the desk.

It was Phoenix, with the sun lurking, but not too hot, with most of the year's blaze starting to fade and a coolness swaying tree branches and brushing my face.

I was listening to my mp3 player as usual, and put my baseball cap on to remind myself I was free from work. Kelly Clarkson was singing about breaking away. I had added that one song of hers to my music rotation a few days back, though typically I am not a fan of female pop singers. I like bands,and usually male bands that play their own instruments.

As I sat there waiting, I was thinking about emotions. (Well, actually, I was thinking about a lot of stuff, from bills, to money, to why am I in Arizona, to I'm hungry). But mostly I was thinking about emotions, and how for some people it takes disaster, even self induced, to feel like you are alive or in control.

Sometimes you walk through life and there is nothing particularly dramatic going on. You eat, work, sleep, and repetez, with never enough deviation in the day's events or the heart's emotions to make the next day slant off on a different more satisfying tangent.

If you drift long enough in that mode, and do not do something smart and make adjustments, you will find yourself doing something accidentally stupid, and with unintended consequences.

Later in the day I ended up at the Deer Valley AMC theatre seeing 3:10 to Yuma, the story of a humble farmer stepping out of his normal routine to do something slightly different today in order to change the arc of his life. Russell Crowe plays the outlaw, who, near the end and deadened by the pattern of his existence, decides to do something out of the ordinary as well. He chooses to do something good by wiping out his own posse, albeit a move I was not wholly fond of, given their loyalty to him. But he was trying to break a pattern, at least in his own heart, if not in his actual life.

Breaking patterns, removing the auto-pilot, is important, but the method chosen makes all the difference in the world. The right way to set off in a different direction is to plan the correct steps and calculate the cost. The wrong method is to let the subconcious mind or your emotions make you impulsive, where you do in fact change your life, but become like a bottle rocket without a stick, swirling around on fire and with no direction.

That is how it is with most things. There are ways and there are ways. So, for example, it is not enough to do good, but rather, to choose the right good that needs to be done (not all good being approrpiate to the time, the place, or your efforts). In changing your life it matters too how you go about doing it. Change can be good to the extent it is organized change and not merely emotionally driven responses to the status quo.

My bus eventually arrived and I got on, wondering if I was headed in a good direction.