Changing direction

Since starting school in Manhattan a few weeks ago, I've already come up with a set route from Penn Station to the campus, and back. My thinking is along the lines of "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line", and so my walk matches that sentiment; I walk straight until the street that I have to make a turn, and then I continue straight yet again.

An interesting thing happened the other day, though: we experienced a tremendous heat wave in the Tri-State area over the past few days, with temperature rising into the high nineties. My ten block, two avenue walk now held the potential of being a really unpleasant trek, and so I developed a meandering route that brought me into as much shade as possible, taking breaks at storefronts that had their doors open to catch a whiff of nice, cold canned air.

At one point, I moved with the crossing traffic to the other side of the avenue and decided to keep my momentum going by just continuing down the street, several blocks before I usually make my turn. As I approached the next cross street, I noticed a branch of our bank that I had never seen before, despite the fact that I pass it every single time I return to the train station.

It's amazing how something can be right in front of our faces for the longest time, and we won't notice it until we approach it from a different angle, a new perspective. Sometimes, you just have to look up.