Everyone knows the four seasons. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. But between every pair of them, there is a quieter fifth one that nobody puts in the calendar. Transition. It’s the stretch where the mornings are still frosty but the afternoons feel like spring. The weeks where it’s officially autumn but you’re still in a T-shirt. The light is doing something it didn’t do last month. The old season is clearly over....
A kid walks into his dad’s bedroom. Dad is lying in bed, as usual. Dad is tired, as usual. The kid asks dad to go to the park and play football. Dad farts, laughs, and tells the kid to go away. A few years later the same kid, now about seven, saves up his pocket money and buys the girl he likes a Valentine’s card and a Mars bar. He gets down on one knee at school (he saw it on a TV ad)....
There is a line I keep coming back to: There is no changing. There is only changed, or hasn’t changed. Thinking about becoming more patient is not patience. Reading about forgiveness is not forgiving. Resolving to be more honest tomorrow is not honesty. The actual test of whether you’ve changed is boring and specific: are you behaving differently or not? Which means you can’t measure the person you’re becoming by what you believe about yourself....
There is a story about Bill Clinton, from early in his presidency. He walks through one of the rougher parts of a city, baseball cap on, Secret Service a few steps back, trying to get a feel for people. A woman recognises him and starts talking. She goes for a while. She is not quiet, and she is not short on complaints. The streets are dangerous, the schools are falling apart, the drugs are everywhere, the jobs don’t pay, nothing is working, nobody is helping....
The problem with asking yourself hard questions about your own thinking is that you are the person asking and the person being asked. Both of them want the same answer. So the honest version of self-inquiry, done alone, tends to collapse into whatever you already thought. The courtroom metaphor is a workaround. In a court, nobody expects the defence and the prosecution to agree. They are supposed to argue opposite sides....