Change

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Running is what the park is for. The whole series is here.

I want to take a moment to celebrate how much it’s possible for people to change.

On one level, I mean this about our bodies—the mechanisms of adaptation, the way that our physiology produces fine-tuned responses to environment and activity, which I have in mind while weathering the peak of my athletic training this year. (I’m very tired. I’m very strong.) But I also mean it about minds, about character, about mission. I grew up in a proselytizing religious tradition that centered the process and consequences of conversion, and that’s one notion from Mormonism that I’ve carried onward in my life after the church—that our beliefs and commitments are constitutive, and that when they change we are converted, a word that originates in the concept of turning. We turn, with the impulse and synchrony of a flock. Our heading changes. We walk down a different road. Those are before-and-after moments in a person’s life. They’re memorable. I bet you can name a few of yours.

Sometimes the trigger for conversion is outside, as when I met James three summers ago and began within days to build a new world, down a different road, with him—a world that now folds in such once foreign elements as small-dog custodianship and voluntary time outside the city.

Sometimes it comes from within, as when a cryptic urge placed me upon a treadmill in L.A. in 2021 to overthrow the—justified, but untrue—belief that my orthopedic history meant I couldn’t run more than the occasional warm-up mile. (Today, in fry-an-egg heat, I ran 12. My halfway point was a monument to FDR’s Four Freedoms—of speech, of worship, from want, from fear.)

If there’s one thing that gives me hope right now—in the face of a mortally imperiled political system, tendencies toward world war, and the rapacious and reckless engineering of technology to replace the human mind, then heart—it’s this capacity to change. Cliches are bad for a reason—they obscure truth. But some are worse than others. And “people don’t change” is among the foulest. We do nothing but. To argue otherwise suggests to me a cynical project, an effort to corral and bury progress, redemption, conversion.

I just turned 42. Looking at the year ahead, I have some changes I’d like to make. But that’s not the point. The point is that my circumstances will change, inevitably—sometimes accompanied by pain, and sometimes by such happy grace that it will be a wonder to have gotten by before. When I write from the other side of my next birthday, it’s a near certainty that the story couldn’t be told without resort to forces now invisible. While I wrote this essay at my kitchen table, a storm came in the likes of which I haven’t seen since Hurricane Sandy. Ten minutes before that it was a sunny day. Now it is again.

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