This morning, as I watered my meager garden, the breeze rustled the leaves and it was cool.  Refreshing.

Yesterday was brutal.  And my (occasionally reliable) weather app tells me there is more of that to come tomorrow.  Today is the respite.

This year has been … intense.  It’s hard to wrap my brain around the fact that I began it in Tokyo with my brother, my cousins, my husband.  Waking up on a mattress on the floor, shivering in the cold.  Now, I’ve been home — uninterrupted — for nearly eight months.  I have grown a garden, I have made pasta and bread.  I began working for the first time in over three years.  Husband and I survived unemployment, battles with health insurance, tricky diseases and family.  We lost his brother.  We gained knowledge and understanding of our world and our country that we had never known before.  We have been uncomfortable, unsure.  Angry.  Sad.  Disappointed.  Afraid.

I’ve spent time this year contemplating the idea of perspective and truth.  How we each come to where we currently are — what we currently believe.  How people I love, have loved, can say and believe the things they do.  How I reconcile that within myself.  How I’ve often – of late- been willing to walk away.

My experiences, my education — my life thus far has shaped how I feel I fit into the world.  There are things I cannot change.  There are things I can and I must.  I must be willing to be supremely uncomfortable, and I must be wise enough to be quiet.  Those things are difficult.  Sometimes, nearly impossible.  I was raised to have and to use my voice.  Deferring to others is a challenge.  But sometimes — and this is so important —  it is the right thing to do.

I have been forever changed this year.  Like all years.  Just more starkly, more abruptly.  There is nothing subtle about 2020.  There is no “going back.”  And for anyone who longs for that, who wishes to return to a “simpler” time — a time before COVID-19, a time before the most recent civil rights movement — you are part of what holds us all back.

We cannot go back.  Not to a time when women had no rights, no voice.  Not to a time before COVID changed our very existence: how we live, how we travel, how we function in the world.  Not to a time when white dominated and erased and marginalized all other colors.  Time does not go back.  To strive to rewind diminishes all that people have worked for toward equality, toward humanity, toward making America’s ideals a reality for all Americans.

I listen to news reports of the RNC and I wonder how people believe him, how my fellow Americans support his lies, his manipulation, his slow movement toward dictatorship and erasure of all humans who do not agree with him.  I can’t make sense of it other than these people, their lives and their education and their values somehow align with him.  And while I cannot understand it, I must acknowledge that we are not all equal, and we do not all believe and put value into the same things.  And while that feels very frightening right now, it is also what makes this America.