On Change
The impact of a change can be drastically different, depending on what ends and what begins; when a magazine subscription runs out has less force over my daily life than when a new president takes office. The last time a new presidency began, a magazine with his face on the cover was mysterious - who is he, without a name? It was actually the cover of TIME, with a superimposed composite, a half-face of Bush and Gore each, which confounded me. That was a change. Many more sizable events have covered magazines since, and now the covers shift - to a new face, and another one who went unrecognized until relatively recently.So after eight years, what has changed America has changed me, and in converse, participations of mine have changed it (in miniscule). Over the last 2,920 days I've spent a fair share in continuity, without any distortions provoked or unsolicited; yet, a number of days were flooring, mountainous arenas of alteration. The greatest changes can go unnoticed and unrealized until weeks, months afterward, when creeping realization storms in, shouting that Everything is different. Maybe this current moment - Jan. 20, 2009 - is of the sleeper distinction, a silent assassin of the standard, tripping history's wires into reverberations that won't truly sound for decades or more.The immediate variety of change may recede with the same expediency in which it's announced. Changes that consume you the moment they begin - an automobile accident - are presently over, as they happen. These events that almost transcend time by how their course begins and ends simultaneously can devastate, but they're a different animal than the sleeper changes, the subconscious departures from our paradigm, which evolve over lengths to mangle the formation of what was into what will be. The question then is what change is more important? More terrifying? More cause for celebration or despair or hope or reflection? An adventure of an instant, or the slowly blowing wind of an eon. I haven't figured out yet what happens with these new magazine covers, putting away the faces of yesterday for the fresh crop of now. A few examples, magazine covers, changes witnessed since the last inauguration of a new American president: September, 2001 - The now category. Insta-change. Glossy pages of terrified faces, burning embers, and the resultant discord. March, 2003: An obvious beginning, the war in Iraq. But what ended? Peace was already missing. November, 2004. Another election. What kind of change was that? A slow mover, trucking into another four years of the same? Or an everything is different, forget your predictions and buckle your seatbelt change? July, 2007, London: A sea-change, slow and heavy? A bullet-fast strike to the comfort zone? June 14, 2002. A random day plucked from thin air, a date apart from celebrity or notoriety. What happened? Something, probably. Some unrecognized change. Change is tricky, because it isn't classified only by what it hopes to affect, but also by its precursors and motivators. I don't know how to rank it - by the end it signifies, or the future it promises. Changes have distinct forms, the personal and the public - moving to a new city, or reading new magazines about a new president. Change can shift in significance from one perspective to the next. Change can weave softly between life's moods, like interplay of air and water in a cirrus cloud, or ravage like wildfire, like the desert sun.