#272 / Safe Passage

Click the image to buy this book. It's a good one. In fact, Safe Passage On City Streets, by Dorothy T. Samuel, made an extraordinary impression on me when I first read it.

The book suggests, in the context of a very specific issue (how to be safe on dangerous city streets), that the realities we confront are not as "given" as we sometimes think, and that we can often conjure with realities to shape and change them, even in the moment in which we experience the realities we modify.

I have always believed that we create the world that we come to inhabit (or at least I have believed this since my father got me to read James Allen). My thinking about this, though, was always focused on either the intensely personal (which is Allen's focus) or on how our actions can make large scale, historical and political changes come about.

Samuel applies the principle in a different way. In effect, she says that we can change realities even in the moment we experience them. It really is a book worth reading. One website, to encourage more readers, offers to "answer detailed questions over the phone," and provides a number.