When you’re exploring something new you need to be mindful of your steps and the roads you walk down. One wrong turn can take you down a bad one and unless you pay attention land you in a tricky situation.
When we were looking to buy a flat in London I used to take the tube to the area we had in mind and walk around on the streets. One day I was walking along a road that initially was really nice but all of a sudden turned into something quite dodgy. In London one end of a street can be posh and the other the complete opposite and that day I’d walking into a bad area without knowing it.
Yesterday as we left the pub we accidentally did the same thing. Slightly disorientated, partly due to the drinks I imagine, we started walking home in the direction that we though was leading to the West Village. But it wasn’t. We were walking the exact opposite way. The street we were on was nice enough but D did ask me if I definitely knew were we were going. I thought I did as we’d looked at my friend’s map on her phone to make sure, but somehow did get east and west confused. It was an area of New York we’d never been to before and an area we didn’t know and though the street names did sound familiar, we lacked the context around why they sounded familiar. In this case that context was that the further into them you walked, the dodgier it also got.
After a while we knew that we were going the wrong way but we didn’t know exactly how wrong. Not until we turned onto the main road and were met by groups of hunched over hoodies and a gut feeling that said “turn back”. Without thinking about it we started to walk a bit quicker and on the next crossing we turned left and started walking back in the direction that we’d just come from. And then we jumped into a cab. No more walking tonight.
I don’t know whether continuing walking down that road last night would in fact have been dangerous but either way we were not supposed to be there. We didn’t have a map and we didn’t know the street names well enough to know that we were walking the wrong way, but we should have done our homework. Though starting a company seldom leaves you in situations where you risk getting robbed, knowing your map and your check points in terms of if you’re on the right road is still quite important. Though our walk last night was only 15 minutes in the wrong direction when it comes to business you’re better off checking in regularly to ensure you’re going the right way rather than spend weeks or months assuming so only to then find out that you should have turned or taken another road way back.
And as for our New York adventure we’ve now learnt a bit more about walking home late at night and that Alphabet City’s Avenue D is not really a street you want to walk on past midnight on Sunday when the only people out are you and the hoodies.
Tomorrow – Day 282 | Teaching in New York
Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4393797546
