Directional Moves

The other day I was reading The Love You Make, the excellent biography of the Beatles by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. I came to Chapter 21, which described John Lennon's final years before his assassination in December 1980. During Lennon's retirement from professional music during the late 1970s in order to raise his son Sean, his wife Yoko Ono dabbled quite a bit in astrology and numerology. One of the results was something called "directional moves", whereby Yoko would, through her "craft", determine the necessity of John traveling "x" number of miles in a specific direction (finding the nearest city to this point) and staying there for a predetermined period of time. And then returning to "home" in New York City. Usually Yoko accompanied John on these abrupt "directional moves", but once she sent him off alone. The assigned destination was Hong Kong, and John nervously complied. He checked into a nice hotel there and, while taking a bath, came to the revelation that for quite possibly the first time in his adult life, he was doing something by himself and making decisions without others making them for him! So John came back full of praise for this experience, and presumably for Yoko's "hocus pocus flim flammery" (my words) that sent him to Hong Kong in the first place.

While Yoko may have believed in her astrology and numerology, it is far more plausible that, as John's wife, she could tell that he was becoming burned out and needed some solitude and a change of venue to help him out of his rut. But for the sake of the article, let me discount the compelling element of love and go to the astrology/numerology angle.

The purpose of "directional moves" was to balance oneself in relation to the rest of the universe, as quirky as that may sound. But it could also be possible, with nothing more than a deck of cards, to produce similar results simply by assigning miles, directions, and time to cards randomly turned up at specific times. The "program" designer would play a hand whereby only a relatively small number of cards would indicate a "directional move". Subsequent random drawings would reveal the details of the trip and stay.

The bottom line is that it's important for people to occasionally get away from their routine. Sometimes, though, people pick routine places to go to in order to accomplish this (defeating to some extent the point of getting away). A "directional move", whether dictated by the dubious practice of astrology/numerology or by just dealing a well-shuffled pack of cards, eliminates this personal bias in selecting getaways and can add a sense of excitement and mystery to the experience. Of course, it helps a bit to be exorbitantly wealthy, too!