Surprises

There's not much that surprises me. But I just had a phone conversation that made me pause. I was on the phone with a woman who could not say the word AIDS. She literally kept saying... you know, "that word." I had to finally come out and say it to believe it. It's so easy to forget that we all live in self-selected pockets. Occasionally you get a reminder of how far we have to go to break common ground. In those moments, the importance of connections could not be clearer. By the end of the phone conversation, she still could not say the word but her tone had changed. Though her moral judgements about AIDS were set in stone, her heart was willing to listen. I hung up the phone feeling slightly sad and thinking about an MLK quote: "And I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable." Process, process, process...