How Red Sneakers Changed My Life

" It is the road to God  that matters now, the ragged road, the wood...W ould   that first world, bared now to the word  God,  wade  with you, through wood, into the weald and weather   of the stars?" The Road Home - Gillian Allnutt Tall, sweeping trees line the sidewalk, leaving me to duck under their branches laden with red and yellow and brown Autumn leaves as I make my way down the street. It's a quiet, sunny afternoon and a slight breeze is in the air. For once, I am whole and unbroken. For once, everything around me is startlingly clear, and detailed, and I can see each groove carved in the aged tree trunk beside me and the patterned veins in the dead leaves that lie at my feet and I can hear the silence of this street and the sound of my blood pounding through my ears and the buildings have never seemed so square and the cars so glaringly bright with the sunlight bouncing off their roofs and the people never so solid. The world around me is no longer blotted ou

I was thinking about the effects of globalization thanks to technology, and what it has managed to do to our world. There's a lot of positive, of course. Distances have been shortened, hell, thanks to video-calling, they're virtually non-existent, we're more aware of what goes on outside our own domain in the wider world, and information of all kinds is readily available for free. You would think that all this socializing and  online sharing would make our world more united, but apparently not. I know this planet has always been teetering on the edge of doom, barely hanging on by a thread and all that, but just take a look around you and you find yourself wondering if things have ever been worse. The downside to globalization is impossible to ignore. It's so easy to commit fraud online, and cheat people out of their money, to hate on others and be downright rude to them on public forums only because their opinion is different from yours, accessing 'illicit sexual

The sun is relentless on this side of the world. I  wake up to blinding sunlight and crows cawing and when I check the time, it's only 7am. There isn't much to do here, say the more fortunate of my friends, home for the holidays, visiting from Canada or Australia or America, conveniently forgetting where they were born, where they started out from. Yes, I admit there isn't much to do in our city. We go to school, or we go to university, maybe get a job if we're lucky. We eat. We sleep. We blame the government for the target killings, the sectarian violence, our houses, our selves getting robbed, the power outages, the cars that stubbornly drive the wrong way on a one-way street, and the cricket matches we lose to India. We parade our faith on the streets when its threatened two continents away, and we will fight to the death to prove a point. We will bathe our city in blood to show our enemies what we can do, and we will bathe it in green for the same reason.