Familiar staircases

Driving home I was acutely aware that the landscape, rush hour traffic, all of the speeding cars with drivers on cell-phones, the smells, the sunset, my yellow Aveo (with Tigger in the back seat), everything about my life was going to change. That which is so familiar was going to be gone in a few weeks. What is going to take its place?

Today, I goggled the hotel where I will be staying in Uganda. It is unbelievable and unexpected. Something that would be seen in Atlantic City or Las Vegas. Do I really understand where I will be going? What prejudices am I bringing with me, I wonder?

Today, we laughed about how at work it sometimes feels like the scene from Harry Potter, the one where the stairs keep moving around and you have to remember where you came from and where you wanted to go. Funny, but pretty scary as well. One time, Harry had to leap to the correct staircase and almost fell. That is what I remembered tonight driving home.

Each day I run up the correct staircase but today, it moved and in the middle of a "google", I leapt to another. And I did not land where I expected. I came to the correct place, but it looked completely different.

I came across the writer Karen Armstrong whose book, The Spiral Staircase, is one that I hope to read this summer. In it's review of the book, The Washington Post wrote that it is "a story about becoming human,..being recognized, finally recognizing oneself". You can read an interview with her at www.powells.com/authors/armstrong.


"You must be the change you want to see in the world"
Mahatma Gandhi