About 49 years ago, before Pesach bein hazemanim in Ponovezh, instead of flying straight back to America, I made a detour to spend a day and a half in London. I have an innate curiosity about the world, and this was a great opportunity. I had a wonderful host, and I was supposed to meet up with some American friends, but at the last minute, they backed out. So my sightseeing was more of a lone intellectual survey than a geshmake bochurim trip.

Of course, there was Big Ben and Buckingham Palace. And because I do enjoy history and antiquity, I decided to visit the famous Tower of London and the Crown Jewels. Although I have no interest in medieval architecture, Norman fortifications, or the intricacies of eleventh-century British construction, after seeing the jewels, I meandered about in the Tower. And once I was already inside a thousand-year-old tower, I looked around and saw a spiral staircase.

People were waiting in line to go up the narrow, spiraling stairway, and thinking that there may even be some more jewels (or maybe even the remains of Henry the Eighth’s numerous victims), my curiosity got the better of me. And I followed. More people followed me. There was only enough room for single file up those more than 100 steps. It was one of those narrow spiral staircases that was most certainly designed before mankind discovered elevators, personal space, or the possibility that somebody might want to change his mind. Up and up we went, winding around in circles, a steady stream of tourists climbing together. I didn’t know any of them, and they didn’t know me. Nobody invited me to join them and nobody told me where we were going.  I had no idea, but just went up. And up.  Actually, the only way to go was up. A fellow behind me said that past the exhibit on top, there was a similar staircase down. I guess getting there is half the fun.

There is something remarkably comforting about following a crowd. You don’t have to make many decisions. The fellow in front of you takes a step, so you take a step. He turns, so you turn. There is somebody behind you and somebody ahead of you, and the very existence of all those people seems to confirm that wherever this staircase leads, it must be worth seeing. So I kept climbing and climbing. More than 100 steps. And then we reached the top. There was some sort of small lobby and it was like an anteroom before a larger room. I looked inside the entrance of the main room and my heart skipped a beat. Maybe more than a beat.

Inside the room, there was a large tzailem, and benches, outside the door, a small sign declaring “The Chapel of St. John” (or some other fellow to that effect).

The staircase to nowhere had taken me somewhere. Somewhere that I should not be. I had not known where the staircase was taking me, but now I did, and suddenly I had a problem. There was only one direction in which everyone was moving and that was up. And there was only one direction in which I needed to go and that was down. And there was no way to go down unless I went through that room. And that was not happening. Then it hit me. I took out my wallet and dropped it down the open space in the center of the staircase. Ten stories down it fell, to the horror of the hundred or so making the trek upward. “My wallet!” I yelled, while slowly attempting to go down the up staircase.

If you have ever tried walking the wrong way through a crowd on a narrow spiral staircase, you understand the predicament. There is no passing lane. There is no shoulder. There is barely room for two people to negotiate who gets the next six inches of stone. And I had perhaps a hundred tourists coming toward me.

“Excuse me. Excuse me. I need my wallet!” I yelled as if my defibrillator had dropped down those flights.

People were trying to tell me that all I had to do was use the other stairway on the other side of the room, but I played very dumb. I had to go back the same way I came. It took a while and a lot of apologies, but I made it.

I have thought about that staircase many times since. Most wrong turns in life don’t begin with somebody standing at a fork in the road and announcing, “I believe I shall choose the wrong path.” Usually, we meander onto them. Someone else is going somewhere, so we follow. Something becomes normal, so we do it too. One step becomes another and then another, nothing dramatic happens, there are no flashing warning signs, and, in fact, there may be plenty of perfectly decent people climbing the exact same staircase. And then it hits you. I better turn around. Not one more step toward oblivion.

That was certainly true in London. The tourists weren’t doing anything wrong. They knew where they were going, and presumably they wanted to see the chapel. Their destination simply wasn’t mine.

And perhaps that is one of the more difficult lessons in life, because not every crowd heading in the wrong direction for you is a decisively bad crowd. Sometimes they are wonderful people. Sometimes they are friends, or colleagues, or people you respect. They simply have a different destination. And if you don’t stop occasionally to ask where the staircase ends, you can travel an awfully long way simply because the fellow ahead of you keeps moving.

The Novi tells us, “Nachpesah derocheinu v’nachkorah v’noshuvah—Let us examine our ways, investigate them, and return to Hashem.” There are three movements in that posuk. First, nachpesah derocheinu, look at the road. Then v’nachkorah, which means not to merely notice that you are moving, but to investigate where you are going. And then comes the hardest word of all. If you went in the wrong direction, then v’noshuvah. Turn around.

It sounds simple when you are listening to a haftorah. It is considerably more complicated when you are on a spiral staircase, because once you turn around, everybody is facing you, telling you, “Throw in the towel. Go back to the direction in which you were once headed.” Until that moment, you blended in beautifully. You moved when everyone moved, you stopped when everyone stopped, and nobody noticed you. Now, suddenly, you are the problem. You are the counterforce. People have to move aside. Someone may glare. Someone may wonder why you can’t simply continue along with everybody else. And you yourself may wonder whether it is really worth all the trouble, because, after all, look how far you’ve already climbed.

They tell the story of a man who gets a frantic call from his wife. “Harry, be careful! They say that there is someone driving in the wrong direction on the freeway!”

“One person?” exclaimed Harry. “There are hundreds of them!”

Sometimes you are the only one going in the right direction, but because so many are coming against you, they say that it is you going the wrong way.

After climbing the staircase, you may say, “I’ve already come this far. I’ve already put so much into this. I’ve already invested the time, spent the money, and told everyone that this is what I’m doing. I’ve already climbed ninety-nine steps.” But the ninety-nine steps are in the past. The future lies in the hundredth step.

Economists call it sunk cost, allowing what we have already invested and cannot recover to determine what we should do next. We have a word for the alternative. Teshuvah. There comes a moment when a person realizes that the question is no longer how much he has invested in the journey. The question is where the journey ends. And how to turn it around. And turning around can be expensive. Sometimes you have to drop your wallet, sometimes you have to turn around and excuse yourself, sometimes you have to head in the opposite direction and face hundreds of people who think they are on the way up.

So we keep heading in one direction, not because we are focused on a particular destination, but because turning around is uncomfortable.

Had I known what lay at the top of the stairs, I most certainly would not have taken the first step. Maybe a proper nachpesah derocheinu v’nachkorah would have negated the need for a v’noshuvah.

I never asked anyone: Where are you going? Where does this lead?

I eventually made it back down that staircase at the Tower of London. Boruch Hashem, I never saw the chapel, and I don’t regret it. I don’t particularly remember the Crown Jewels either. But I remember throwing my wallet down the stairs. It contained quite a bit of money and some important documents. I was in such a reversal mode that I did not think about them when I knew it was my ticket out.

Sometimes you have to go against traffic and, sometimes, you don’t have to worry about “What’s in your wallet?”

And that’s what I think about every time I hear the words, “What’s in your wallet?”

Sometimes there’s a lot. But sometimes you just have to throw it down the spiral staircase.

Just saying.