Facing Change
First published in the print column, Strictly Haresay
I’m at my son’s home this week, writing this. His house sits in the heart of a region known as Devil’s Nest where deep ravines cut the hillsides bordering the upper Missouri. It’s a rough but beautiful landscape, and legend has it Frank and Jesse James once holed up in this area for a few years. Locals say the remains of their shelter can still be found in one of these canyons if you know where to look.
Speaking of hills and valleys and knowing where to look, if you’re at all confused about gender identification in this modern age—because drawing conclusions based on anatomy is no longer a reliable indicator—if you decide to turn to the dictionary for answers, you’ll find that the online version of the Cambridge Dictionary has now updated its definition of woman to include “anyone who identifies as female, regardless of birth gender.” As if all the kerfuffle over pronouns weren’t enough, we now need to muddy the waters further by changing word definitions to properly reflect the confusion.
And while we’re on the subject of being confused, I’m wondering what baby gender reveal parties of the future will even look like. Nowadays expectant couples have all kinds of cute and creative ways to reveal their baby’s gender to family and friends before the birth. But if that’s an identification that’s now being left to the child’s choosing, I guess parents will have to wait until the kid hits puberty before they’ll even know. (Of course, it could change later.)
On the subject of choice, I recently picked up a novel written by Heather Marshall called “Finding Jane.” The book is inspired by real life events surrounding a secret network of doctors and nurses that helped women—real women, with real women’s body parts and real women’s issues—gain control over their own reproductive choices at a time when women weren’t allowed such freedom. It’s a beautifully written work of fiction about choices and where they lead us, as well as a wise and timely reminder of the difficult road women had to walk not so long ago.
It was also not so long ago that I lived a mere mile and a half from this place where my son currently resides. The roads he travels daily are the same ones I used to drive. The faces of the farmers in the tractors are still familiar to me. The rolling hills, dipping valleys and winding creeks seem much the same, though the world—and even I, myself—are very changed now.
Sometimes it gets to me when everything I’ve always relied on and known to be true changes, or is challenged or proven faulty or false. I start to feel like the guy who wrote that old song, “Stop the World and Let Me Off.” But I know that, as individuals, we must change in order to grow, so that must be true for us as a collective, as well. Society must change in order to evolve.
It was Einstein who said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” And thinking of myself as intelligent used to have a certain consoling appeal until I learned that the brilliant Mr. Hemmingway, not long before taking his own life, was quoted as saying, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
