9. The Geometry of Surrender
Dearest Family and Friends, If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your younger self? It’s an evocative question, but flip the words around and it becomes even more compelling: If your younger self could see you now, what advice would he give you? My fourteen-year-old self has been talking to me of late. Of course, he doesn’t give me advice directly. Instead, he placed a particular memory in my seventy-year-old consciousness and I have to figure out why it's there and what it means. My memory dates from 1969, when my father took a sabbatical in Berkeley California, the city in which I live today. It was a challenging year for me. I exchanged my cozy Ohio college town — where I knew all the streets and could ride my bicycle till sundown — for an unfamiliar and unruly metropolis. The enormous UC Berkeley campus was on edge, and so was I. Daily protests about the Vietnam war devolved into riots. Barricades were set ablaze and police used tear gas to disperse protest...