I was driving down one of our North Carolina roads the other day which, if you are familiar with them are narrow, curvy, bumpy and shoulderless. If a deer, racoon, or your neighbor's Shar Pei runs into the road its skin will soon be smoothed out under your bumper. So there I was driving down the scenic Carolina road, enjoying the sound of the suspension on the Ford Taurus being torn out by the potholes, when a squirrel left the safety of its home in the trees on one side of the road to venture into the wild free space of the other side of the road. The creature had a good thing going in his adventure when he made a colossal mistake. Half way across the road, he hesitated sensing danger. Maybe it was the crackling suspension telling him that my steering was about to give out, not that it would matter on these narrow roads there would have been nowhere for me to steer. Perhaps it was the smell of the half a quart of oil per mile the Ford burns, but the squirrel stopped midway through his new adventure.
He remained poised in the middle of the road trapped between his sense of safety, which was back where he had come from, home, and his sense of danger to keep going forward in his adventure. Unfortunately for him safety was to launch out into the vast unknown ahead. He chose to make a run for what seemed safe to him, to go back and he got stretched out on the asphalt like my neighbor's Shar Pei. Sometimes safety, contrary to our deepest feelings is straight ahead into the unknown.
