Back when I was a young'un, I signed up for Driver's Education in summer school.
This is a rite of passage for an American teenager in which one spends time with a bunch of other teenagers, and a coach of some team draws summer salary to shepherd them all through a textbook on traffic laws, watch gruesome videos on what can go wrong when driving, and occasionally march the class next door to use "driving simulators" in which we would all watch a movie starring the front end of a land-barge meandering through a neighborhood. For this movie time, we sat behind Apollo-era "simulators" that did nothing whatsoever to affect anything depicted on the screen.
It was as gripping as it sounds.
This edition came with an option for "behind the wheel" training, in which the off-season coach would get in an actual car with a bunch of, uh, scholars behind the wheel.
His only defenses were verbal commands and an extra brake pedal.
When this particular, uh, scholar was behind the actual wheel (as opposed to the toy ones in the simulator), she was in the process of doing a dumb thing.
The task at hand was parking the car in a parking lot with perpendicular (as opposed to angled or parallel) spaces. Your humble narrator, with all the wisdom and sparkling brilliance bestowed by 15.7 years of life and a brain marinated in an internal bath of pubescent hormones, was to attempt this task.
As the car swung around from the direction of traffic to the direction of parking, it was immediately evident that I'd taken the turn too late. The front corner of the instructional car was going to make contact with the rear fender of some poor person foolish enough to park in the high school parking lot over the summer.
I had set my course and was resigned to my fate.
That's when the adult in the room-on-wheels stamped on his brake pedal and looked at me in exasperation. "You can stop and change direction!"
As soon as he said it, it was immediately obvious that he was correct. Just because I had chosen a path didn't mean that I needed to see it through to its end, especially given that it was going to end in disaster.
Now, this particular story is of a dumb teenager, but the number of times I've heard this man's voice in my head, "You can stop and change direction!" is beyond counting.
We all make decisions, start to walk down paths professional, personal, or even literal, and get an inkling that it's not going to go where we want or need to go. Or that even if it does end in the right place, there's some sort of catastrophe lying in wait.
When you get those little inklings, those little prickles, or even those obvious red flags and hollering klaxons, remember: You can stop and change direction.