Last week, I was talking with my mom on the phone in my apartment when the fire alarm went off. I told her to wait for a minute or two to see if it stopped or they made some type of announcement about this being a test. The alarm didn't stop and there was no announcement. Told her I'd call her back, put my shoes and coat on and headed out into the cold.

My building is actually two buildings that are connected. I exited through the stairwell into a parking area between the buildings. Immediately across from this was the gym on the first floor. The gym has large windows and there were people running on treadmills and using the elliptical machines. Other people were lifting free weights. They lifted their weights and continued their work-outs as though no alarm was going off. Sure, most of them had earphones in, but if you can't hear the alarm, you might be curious about the growing number of people congregating between the buildings.

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Last week, I was sitting up front on the stage of the Stories We Don't Tell, a live storytelling show I co-produce. I'm usually off to the side to help with the audio recording of the performers. The host of the show, Stefan Hostetter, referred to the event as an 'experiment in empathy' and this made me think, as I sat there watching the audience watch the performers, that with the recent political turmoil, just getting up and sharing your story is a political act.

Then I thought, Oh, shit, this is bad.

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What does the Lord of the Rings and Batman Begins have in common? You’ll have to read to the end of this unnecessarily long diatribe to find out.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about change, specifically how I want to evolve and get better as a person. I don’t really need to get into what the catalyst was, let’s just say it was a series of things, big and small, that brought me to the conclusion that I need to not just change a few things about myself, but do a complete overhaul.

As many people do around this time of year, I started thinking about my diet. Again. I’ve put a lot of thought into adopting a plant-based diet. Lots of thinking, very little action. I actually tried to do this once before and quickly changed my food intake all at once. I mean, I don’t eat terribly, but the withdrawal from that experience was just too much. I was weak, well, maybe weak is too strong a word, let’s say I wasn’t ready. So, I went back to thinking about it.

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A few weeks ago, I was driving in my car and a recent unfortunate experience popped into my head. The experience was a small one, like minuscule small, so insignificant that if I tried to explain it here, I would feel embarrassed and ridiculous. But that’s the thing, I’ve probably thought of this experience no less then 2 - 3 times a day since it happened. The reality is that the other people that were present when this happened have probably thought about it zero times a day. It’s a secret shame, one that makes no sense to anyone but me, something that if I attempted to explain to my closest friend, he would probably be confused by my inadequacy of not being able to get past these kinds of things.

But then after that moment in the car, another thought popped into my head and that thought was: It doesn’t matter. And that third thought was: yes, that statement is true. And I thought about all the things and the people and the situations that don’t matter. Maybe some of these things that don’t matter to me are important to you, and I mean no disrespect, but that doesn’t matter either.

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