Irresistible

I had nothing in particular on the agenda one day, so I considered watching paint dry. It’s the definition of boring, because I know I can’t see it happening. I may even get a little impatient with the time it takes, but I trust the process, at the end of which I can move on to use the thing that was once wet.

Life’s processes often take much longer. I drove through L.A. this past week, and noticed that I could see the surrounding mountains. This used to be a rarity years ago because of the smog. But now, generations of cleaner-burning cars have filled the roads. There are so many of them – it’s Southern California – that I didn’t get anywhere fast, but at least the scenery was nicer than it used to be. The clearer skies seemed like a sudden event, because I don’t live in L.A.

The past couple of weeks in this country have been dazzling indeed. “Sea change” doesn’t begin to do it all justice. Same-sex marriage is now legal, and Confederate flags are being erased from view. The U.S. and Cuba have agreed to open embassies on their respective soils. Those still alive in future decades will be telling grandchildren where they were when the news of these things broke.

But unless we live with a process daily, we forget that it took an enormous struggle for these things to happen. In the case of gay marriage, it started with Stonewall in New York almost half a century ago, followed by hundreds of legal and social battles. It was just plain time for the Supreme Court to do what it did.

Since the end of the Civil War, the Confederate flag has been a symbol that most Americans have tolerated as a quirky Southern historical symbol, one that many Southerners still embrace. Now it is a symbol of racial oppression. The Civil War was a necessary event, but of course, it didn’t settle everything. We often forget that the process seemed to begin with the Abolitionist movement that started decades before in New England -- all of this leading up to 2015.

And Americans will soon be traveling to Cuba in large numbers, and vice versa. It seems like yesterday that Cuba was a mortal enemy, once a direct threat to our survival. But the thawing of hostility was a half-century process, and people actually had to get old or die off to allow it to happen.

Evolution is a logical and methodical process, but it’s usually long, sometimes invisible, and almost always painful, even on an individual level. Someone we thought of as a close friend evolves into a different person. It may be time for a connection to end, but we may resist the process, not recognizing that we have changed too. Evolution is inevitable, and resisting it often results in pain. Not everyone is pleased with the outcome, at least for the moment.

But if you are allowed to stay on this planet long enough, the threads become more and more visible. You begin to see how the dots connect. A little knowledge of history helps you accept, and hopefully appreciate, the process when it involves positive movement. And you realize that a milestone is just a marker on what is a very long path.