Obstacles are those frightful things you see
when you take your eyes off your goal.

Henry Ford¹

I

Tuco was worried about Paco.
Paco had told him about his dilemma.

He didn't have answers or advice for Paco,
he pondered the dilemma.
Now Tuco read the sentence again,
"You become what you think about!"²
That worried him.
About himself as well as Paco.

Later Tuco was reading a conversation
between the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman.³
Ekman made an important assertion:
"Guilt and shame are very important,
and different, emotions.
Guilt is about action,
shame is about who you are."

Tuco remembers another time like this.

But there is this scar
nearly unnoticed now,
a faint line
across
an older one.°

Now feels like then.

But he knows this time Paco will know
that there is another's thoughts
and actions to consider.
There are obstacles
and there are the emotions of another.

Step on a twig, snap,
and the other is gone
once more.

Then an obstacle becomes a wall.

However, most emotions have a signal,
so that is one characteristic....

A second characteristic is that emotions
can be triggered automatically
in under a quarter of a second...
totally opaque to consciousness....

We have evolved a mechanism for dealing
with sudden threats and yet
now we live in a world
where threats are not always so sudden.
We may, therefore, overreact....

Paul Ekman³

II

Ekman talks about how a person's appraisal of an event
triggers an emotion, not the event itself.

The notion that there is a part of us that can monitor,
that can watch what we are experiencing,
is very important.
But we do not usually have that with emotion.
It is the nature of emotions to keep consciousness out.³

Tuco stops reading, lays the book aside.
This will take time to process, he thought.

There’s a paradox at the center of every capitalist democracy,
[Robert] Reich believes.
“Capitalism has become more responsive to what we want
as individual purchasers of goods,
but democracy has grown less responsive to what we want
together as citizens,” he wrote.»

III

A wider collection of obstacles, Tuco thinks.
As we get more of what we think we want personally
we lose connection to our community
and what it needs.

And we come to be more driven by emotions
we don't know anything about
rather than by what we are conscious of
and care about,
and care for.

Scary thought, he ponders
as he nudges the roan to move forward
into the shade.

Tuco thinks of his friend who lost his dad last year.
A dad who spent his life building community
after community.
It's time Tuco visits this friend
and sees if he's ready to build on what his dad did
with help from Tuco and Paco.

He recalls a phrase from Thoreau in Walden,
"Only that day dawns to which we are awake."