Human beings have almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality. I probably would hve trudged down the same road for the rest of my life, but then something happened.I took a business trip to Virginia and it was an awful experience. My new clients were like greedy children without any sense of responsibility. At one point in the meeting I suggested that they give one percent of their yearly income to charities in their community and they complained that i wasn't tough enough to deal with their investments.

   Everything got worse after that. There were hundreds of police officers at the Washington airport because of some kind of special alert. I got searched twice pasing through security and then I saw a man have a heart attack in the waiting lounge. My plane was delayed six hours. I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things that I didn't need. The mesage was that people could only be pasive victims or consumers.


   When I got back to Houston, it was about 110 degrees with 90 percent humidity.

 Halfway home my car broke down on the freeway. No one stopped of course. No one wanted to help me. I remember getting out of the car and looking up to the sky. It was a dirty brown color because of all the pollution. Trash everywhere. The noise of the traffic surrounding me. I realised that there was no reason to worry about hell in the afterlife because we've already created hell on earth.
   And that's when it happened. This pickup truck stopped behind my car and a man got out. He was carrying an old ceramic cup - no handle - like something you'd use for a tea ceremony in Japan. He walked up to me and didn't introduce himself or ask about my car. He looked in my eyes and I felt like he knew me, that he understood what I was feeling at the moment. Then he offered me the up and said "Here's some water. You must be thirsty."

   The stranger asked me about my life and for some reason I began telling him everything. How unhappy I was. How I was worried about my spouse and my children. How I had to take pills to go to sleep at night.

   At first he didn't say very mch. But when you were with him, it felt like he could look inside your heart.

   He was a Traveller