Catherine, because we’ve now had the opportunity to meet, I admire you for the courage it took to write this piece. I also admire the courage and wisdom it took to write this: “I am open to this possibility of life-altering change, but also cautious because I anticipate challenges to my core belief system. I think it will also be an awakening for me; heightening my awareness of how the world’s priorities have reformed and molded my once firm perceptions about what is most important.”

That kind of self-awareness and the willingness to meaningfully examine our bedrock convictions is exceedingly rare. Case in point: I once shared this quote from Kenneth Burke with someone: “An ‘ideology’ is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways: and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it.” That someone responded by saying, “I don’t have an ideology.” In contrast to you, that person is willfully blind to himself.

Thank you for writing this piece and sharing it with us. I look forward to reading more of your work.