On Avoiding Trouble. I was flying into San Jose, Costa Rica, sitting in the cockpit jump seat of a private Gulfstream jet that was taking eleven corporate CEOs and me to philosophize together in the cloud forest and on the beach for a few days. The pilots and I had been talking about philosophy and mythology, when suddenly both went silent and their heads began to swivel left and right, back and forth repeatedly. Finally I said, “What’s up?” The captain replied, “Air traffic just told us there are aircraft in the area and they’re not always equipped with transponders around here. You know, small planes, crop dusters, tourist sightseeing stuff for the volcanoes. We have to see if we can make visual to avoid any problem.” I immediately grasped the sort of problem to which he so gently alluded.

In my short novel The Oasis Within, as a caravan is crossing the desert in Egypt in 1934, a wise old man named Ali at one point talks with his young nephew Walid about a deadly poisonous snake to be found in the area. Ali tells Walid that the snake makes a distinctive sound as he moves across the sand, and that if you know the noise and listen for it, you can avoid the creature even if it’s outside your field of vision. He then extends the lesson to trouble generally, saying that most troubles somehow announce themselves in advance if we’re paying enough attention and listening well, or watching carefully enough. When I heard this fictional conversation and was writing my book, I remembered the pilots watching for trouble in order to avoid it. They succeeded, happily. And we had a great time of philosophy in a beautiful place I’d never been. The lesson of course is obvious. We often talk about trouble sneaking up on us. But that hardly ever happens when we're paying attention.