"America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions." -- David Simon

In my last post I whined about change being hard, but what's funny is that the large-scale changes, the big structural stuff that people vote for or against, has never scared me. I am honored to bear witness to such change, in fact. Whether those big changes ultimately end up being good or bad, they are almost always a sign of progress, and almost always the result of good intentions. And I get to watch them happen. I get to say, I was there when that happened. I remember what I was wearing. I remember the toast we made.

I spent years being afraid of the smaller changes, the graduations and relationships and walks outside in daylight. One day I was grilling eggplant for my dinner and a fleet of butterflies rose up outside my third floor window and poof, my fears flew away, smoking up into a gray plume disappearing. The oil sizzled and cleared and I wondered what I had been holding on to and why.

I learned, worked, to find my fears' roots and dig them out on spring days. I am lucky I had the space and tools to do that. I wish we all did, so our fears, large or small, could be dissected enough for us to realize there's some bit of beauty, of freedom, in them. In realizing that part of what we do here, all of us, is just swim along in the current of changes we never thought we wanted, trying to find our own air.