This post was originally published in April 2010.  The shuttle program’s final mission lauched on Friday, so I thought it timely and appropriate to offer these thoughts again.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been listening to various newscasters mention the impending shuttering of the NASA shuttle program.  After 30-some years of space exploration, the program is being disbanded, and surprisingly, I care.

I am not a science buff.  I care very little about space exploration, rockets, moon dust, and the like.  It is all so far away, so abstract, and has so little bearing on my daily life.  Other than the disasters, all of our space exploration has captured very little of my attention.  Nevertheless, the romance of it resonates with me.

I can imagine the 1960s.  I can picture the race with Russia.  I can understand the sense of incredible national accomplishment of Neil Armstrong’s small step that was for our country a giant leap.  And I can understand how the realization of President Kennedy’s dream fostered pride in Americans and a drive to keep striving for more.

My life has never existed without NASA buzzing about somewhere in the background; shuttles preparing to launch; satellite photos showing up in National Geographic and Time magazines.  I was born into the country that won the space race and wore that badge proudly.  As a product of the seventies I have never seen America’s superiority legitimately challenged, and there’s a certain level of braggadocio that can develop as a result.

But now we’re sitting down for a few years.  We’re going to have to hitch rides on a Russian shuttle while our own program is in time out.  Granted, there is a new program on the horizon, but it will be several years before the Constellation program is actively launching anything.  And there’s something about this that makes me a little bit sad.  It’s reassuring to know that your country’s best and brightest are behind the wheel, doing things that you will never be smart or brave enough to do yourself.

When I say it like this it feels silly.  Much as the shuttle program didn’t affect my daily life during its lifespan, its ending likely won’t either.  And if I gleaned any sense of security from our space exploration it was probably unfounded.  I suspect that subconsciously I liked to believe that if we had the time and money to be bouncing around space, then things here on the ground must be in pretty good shape.  But I don’t have to read too many headlines to know that’s not true.

I guess what it boils down to is that there is something romantic and powerful about space travel.  And walking away from it – even if temporarily – feels like we’re taking a step backward.  Once the newness of this change has worn off the topic of our space exploration program will probably return to the outer recesses of my mind.  But when it comes back, I’ll be cheering for it to be better than ever before.

Last month the nation took notice when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas announced in the The New York Times Magazine that he had been living in the U.S. illegally since the age of 12.  As a follow-up to that article he was interviewed by Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday; an interview that I listened to with rapt attention.

Of all that was fascinating about Vargas’ story, the element that most captivated me was the one that I felt was most overlooked – the circumstances under which he left his home country.  In his NYT piece Vargas describes it this way:

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle. He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was 1993, and I was 12.

In the NPR interview Vargas elaborated that he has never left the U.S. since his arrival here in 1993, and has not seen his mother since the day he left her.  He commented that he understood from a very young age that his future lay in America; that he did not know how or when that future might begin, only that some day it would.

But back to his departure from the Philippines.  I cannot fathom it.  For starters, having been lucky enough to be born in a developed nation, much less into a happy, educated, and stable family, I cannot entirely wrap my head around what it must be like to grow up knowing that everything around you is something you’re trying to escape.  Further still, I cannot imagine, at the age of 12 – old enough to understand the magnitude of what’s happening, yet not old enough to control any of it – being shipped off with a stranger with no prior warning and very little explanation.  And yet the way Vargas tells it, this was not by any means the most poignant moment of his journey as an illegal immigrant.  But I would imagine that this kind of thing happens all the time.

The promise of a better life, that’s what motivates these often-heart-wrenching stories.  Vargas beat the odds – most illegal immigrants do not go on to work for the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the New York Times.  (Even the most advantaged journalists struggle to compete for those jobs.)  But in spite of the odds of any notable success being slim, those odds are perceived as an improvement over a person’s status quo.

So I wonder, does the promise of that better life offer enough hope to assuage the pain of being ripped from your mother at the dawn of your adolescence?  Are those wounds that can ever heal?  In his NPR interview Vargas didn’t speak about there being wounds there at all (which isn’t to say that they aren’t there and were perhaps just too personal to discuss, or simply not the point of his story).  But if this story were mine I can only imagine that that August morning in 1993 would be a pivotal moment in my experience, rather than merely the introduction.

I wonder if he thinks it was worth it.  I wonder if the promise of a better life – a promise which for Vargas was actually realized – was enough to offset what had to have been a traumatic moment.  Even more so I wonder about the people who do not end up as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists – the people who end up picking fruit or cleaning hotel rooms.  For those people was that promise, which America maybe didn’t make good on, enough to soothe the loss of what they left behind?

Last year I was something of a New Year’s Resolutions maven.  I laid out my resolutions on January first and lived up to each of them all year long.  It was incredibly satisfying.

So far, this year has been different.  At the moment, I’m one for nine.  (I have actually been pretty good about carrying reusable grocery bags.)  Here we are, more than a third of the way through the year and I have only one victory to my name.  I still have plenty of time to make good on most of my promises, but there’s one in particular that has been a real struggle and I have a strong suspicion that it’s not going to improve.  My nemesis this year?  Reading.

This particular failing hits me hard because my reading goal for last year – to read more nonfiction – was a smashing success.  I devoured one nonfiction title after another.  As a lifetime reader of novels up to that point I was both invigorated by and impressed with my ability to find such strong affection for a new genre.  Not only did I like trying something different, but I liked having a reading goal for the year.  I established a new reading goal for this year – to read literary classics – and was eager to replicate last year’s success.

By this time last year I’d finished about five books within my goal category.  My tally this year: none.  I’ve been 20 pages into Anna Karenina for about three months now.  Every time I pick it up I enjoy what I read, but can’t seem to plow through more than three or four pages at a time and finally stalled out completely a month or so ago.  It’s completely depressing.  I’ve had some big distractions lately which make my failure slightly more tolerable.  Nevertheless, I’m still disappointed in myself.

The silver lining to all this, though, is that I’m about to permit myself a paradigm shift.

I don’t like not reading.  And for whatever reason Tolstoy, Cather, Dickens, the Brontes, Shakespeare, Proulx, and Franzen aren’t doing it for me right now.  As long as I keep myself boxed into this category, reading just doesn’t appeal to me.  Since not reading at all is not a path I’m willing to take (that would be a bigger failure than merely flaking out on my classics goal), I’ve decided to change tack.  And I have my new niece to thank for that.

I flew out to the West coast last Friday to visit my sister’s tiny and darling lump of a baby.  Since I wasn’t especially enthralled with the book I had brought along I started perusing her shelves when I got here.  Without much thought I picked up her copy of “Prep.”  For reasons I can’t adequately articulate, but which almost certainly relate exclusively to misperceptions about the quality of the writing and the relevance of the subject matter, I didn’t read it when it hit the bestseller lists about five years ago.  Something about being in vacation mode permitted me to indulge myself of a book with a pink grosgrain belt displayed across the dust cover.  But within the first 10 pages I was hooked.  Not only did I quickly discover how brilliant Curtis Sittenfeld’s writing is, but I remembered how great it feels to get lost in a book.

I bring this all up today because in the life of this blog I’ve been a big advocate of goals.  I still am a big advocate of goals.  I think it’s important to identify the things about ourselves that we wish were different and earmark them for improvement.  However, I also think it’s important to be realistic, flexible, and tolerant when we fall short of our ambitions.  In this case I’m choosing a lesser of evils.  Better to read what engages me (within reason, of course – no Danielle Steele around here) than not to read at all.  Perhaps later in the year I’ll find myself with renewed vigor for the classics.  But for the moment I’m happy to be devouring something unexpected, fun, and wickedly clever.  For the moment it was more important to renew my vigor for reading in the first place.

Before commencing with today’s post, I wanted to mention that via NYT’s Motherlode blog I was turned onto this article which is an interesting follow up to my post about nature v. nurture in childrearing.  Once again, we forget the disadvantaged as we dicker about on problems of privilege.  It isn’t long, and I highly encourage you to read it.

I don’t typically pay all that much attention to gas prices.  I fondly remember the days when I turned 16 and gas was $0.89 per gallon (that makes me feel really old, by the way).  But I consider the two or three dollars per gallon I pay today part of living in suburban America and don’t worry too much about it.  However, even I took notice when I filled my tank on Monday and my receipt read $61.56.

I’m not the only one raising my eyebrows at current gas prices, but I may be in the minority in that I don’t see anything but regular unleaded in my near future.  This is likely due to a couple of factors.  1) My car is paid for, which is nothing to sneeze at.  2) I really love my car, I enjoy driving it, and meets my needs.  Given those two conditions, it would take a much bigger spike in gas prices than what we’re seeing today to get me to ditch my current set of wheels.

So I was surprised to learn from this short piece on NPR that if gas prices hit five dollars per gallon roughly 78% of Americans would consider purchasing an electric car.  The catch is that this 78% isn’t willing to pay a premium for an electric car.  Given that electric cars are still substantially more expensive than comparable fuel injection vehicles then the reality is that most Americans fall into my camp and plan to keep their current cars for a while.  Nevertheless, I find the statistic interesting.

When it comes to the automobile we, as a culture, have been largely reluctant to embrace significant change.  And because of that reluctance to embrace change, auto makers have had little incentive to develop it.  In the past 30 years we’ve added sunroofs, airbags, CD players, and GPS systems.  But the cars we drive today are otherwise surprisingly similar to those our parents drove when we were kids.

I wonder, though, if we’re finally reaching our tipping point.  Further still, if that is true, are we reaching our tipping point because we can see that a viable alternative is within reach?  If significant progress had not been made on electric and fuel cell vehicles in the past five years would we be so willing to consider a future without petroleum-based transportation?  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m glad to see Americans’ willingness to consider an alternative (and in another three or four years I’ll share it).  But I wonder if this is a little bit like realizing you’re about to lose an argument and then suddenly opening your mind to the other person’s point of view.  You’re not caving.  You’re just enlightened.  Riiiiight.

I’m not always the biggest fan of the free market.  There are certainly instances when it serves us well.  But in this case I believe it has set us back at least a generation.  We, as the market, did not demand an alternative to gasoline-powered cars because we had abundant and cheap oil and there was no reason to disrupt the growth of our expanding carbon footprint.  But now that gas prices are becoming uncomfortable we’re beginning to see that perhaps President Carter had a point way back when.

In the long run, I’m glad to see that automakers are preparing for the post-gasoline world, because it’s coming whether we like it or not.  I just hope that moving forward the free market, in its infinite wisdom, will consider the long run when it makes its demands.  Unlikely, I realize.  But a girl can dream.

Around this time last year I was wrapping up a month-long vegetarian experiment.  Its purpose was not only to challenge my dietary boundaries, but to learn about the nature of our food supply, so I augmented my vegetarian practices with some educational reading.  By the end of the month I had determined that I would reintroduce meat into my diet, but that I would be more selective about the sources of the meat.  And for a long time I lived up to that commitment.  But I’m here to confess to you today that lately I have backslid.

See that roast chicken?  The one right up there?  It looks delicious, doesn’t it?  Well, I can assure you it was.  That very chicken was served for supper in our house last night.  I served it with orzo pasta and roasted vegetables.  Yum yum.  However, in spite of its deliciousness, I have some major ambivalence about it.

You see, that chicken – the delicious one up there – represents a moral failing on my part.  When I purchased that chicken I stood in the butcher section of my grocery store and looked at it.  Then I looked at the free range, organic, air chilled one next to it.  The second one truly did look better.  Then I looked at the price tags.  My chicken (about 4.6 pounds, for those who keep track of such things) cost $3.23.  The guilt-free bird (of comparable size)?  It was a little more than $16.  Sixteen dollars!  For one chicken!  I just couldn’t do it.  So I picked up the cheaper chicken (or, the “chipper chicken” for those who have watched Father of the Bride too many times), and slinked away.

People like Michael Pollan would tell me that a chicken should cost about $16; that factory farming has artificially created an economy that allows me to purchase a chicken for $3.23; and that while I may not be paying for my chicken at the cash register I am paying for it in other ways (such as filth in our food system, environmental damage, and the moral degradation that results from supporting shameful animal husbandry practices).  And they would be right.

So why, then, do I find it so hard to pay what Pollan types would argue is a fair price for a chicken?  And why am I still worrying about it days later?  And why am I fessing up here in this blog post?

I guess I’m here writing these words because I feel like it’s the honest thing to do.  This?  Having integrity about the source of the food we eat?  It’s hard.  Factory-farmed food is easy.  It’s cheap.  And it’s highly convenient.  I’ve read books and newspaper columns and magazine articles and blog posts about our food system.  Most of it sickens me.  And yet, in spite of all my knowledge, when faced with two chickens and a $13 price difference, I made a choice I’m not proud of.

During my vegetarian experiment last March I never did watch Food, Inc.  I think my conscience could use a jump start in this department, so I’m vowing here to watch it soon.  In the meantime, I’m hoping that by coming clean in this post I’ll be able to shame myself into being more conscientious in my shopping habits.

I’m not perfect.  And while I’ve never claimed to be, there for a while I had some pride about my dietary morality.  So I’m here confessing my shortcomings, and hoping that a dose of humility will serve its purpose.

A couple of weeks ago GAP and I were driving somewhere and he said to me, “You know what the next big thing is going to be?”

“Plastics?”

“No.”  He blew right past my joke.  “Robots.”  And then he went on to tell me how we are standing in the doorway of a whole new era of robotics.  I felt like I’d traveled back to the early eighties but still listened attentively while he told me of an article he read about recent advancements in robots.

Then, driving to work one morning last week I heard this piece on NPR about… robots.  As it turns out GAP was not so far off the mark after all.

Apparently there is, in fact, a new wave of robots being designed, built, and actually used in society.  Up to this point most robots (C-3PO notwithstanding) have been utilitarian in nature.  They performed repetitive physical functions like assembling car parts.  They lacked distinctly human characteristics and they presented no threat to our understanding of interpersonal relationships.

However, the nature of robots is changing.  Per NPR robotic babies are being used to comfort the elderly, and robotic nannies are helping look after children.  According to Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, the evolution of robots to fill human emotional needs is cause for concern.  Turkle was interviewed in the NPR piece and commented that the difference between new robots and old robots is that the new robots are, “proposing themselves to substitute for human beings in these more intimate roles.”

Turkle goes on within the interview to explain that the people she has interviewed have expressed interest in robot companions because of the disappointment they experience in other people.  She even told of one woman whose boyfriend was such a slouch that she envisioned replacing him with a robotic boyfriend.

Really?

Maybe I’m naïve.  Maybe it’s all written on the wall in front of me and I’m still not seeing it.  But I just don’t see this actually happening.  There may be a sad, lonely, person here or there who dreams of life with an inanimate companion, but I think that person is the exception.  The reason I believe this is that we know the difference.  (Did anyone else see Lars and the Real Girl?)  We know that programmed affection from a machine is not the same as real affection from a person.  No amount of technological sophistication can change that.

What interests me more, though, is a tangent to the robot premise.  I wonder about the increasingly robotic nature of our relationships with other people.  We keep up via Facebook and Twitter.  We hit Reply All on e-mail threads.  My MBA girlfriends and I try to connect for one breakfast or dinner per month, but even that has been hard now that most of us are mothers of very young families.  Apart from the three colleagues with whom I eat lunch most days, the sweeping majority of my interaction with my friends is electronic.

This is largely due to convenience, but there is also a safety net in mass electronic communication.  If I’m sitting in a one-on-one situation with you I have to be tuned into you.  I have to read you.  I have to respond to you.  That’s a lot of work, not to mention the fact that I could really screw it up.  Conversely, I have an audience of one.  If something I say doesn’t resonate with you, it might hit me hard.  But in the electronic realm we communicate with a panel of friends.  We only have to talk about ourselves.  Chances are good that someone among our online friends will see fit to endorse what we post.  And we only have to respond to people if we really want to.  Most of what we read goes untouched.  We could never get away with this kind of behavior in real life.

I don’t think we will ever rely on robots the way we rely on people.  It just won’t happen.  But I do worry that without practice our interpersonal skills might atrophy over time, and with that atrophy our in-person relationships will become unsatisfying.  The risk here is not that robots will replace people as companions.  The risk is that without practice our social skills become so scant that we might, even if only for a moment, want them to.  And that, to me, is scary enough.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

- George Santayana, Reason and Art

Spring is not yet here.  Try as I might to will that it be so, I have no such powers.  So as I twiddle my thumbs until mid-April finally arrives, I am prone to consider why it is that I get so itchy about the seasons this time of year.

I love experiencing seasons.  Even more so I love the change of seasons.  I love the feeling of anticipation (and even sometimes the frustration) that builds this time of year when I’ve long since quenched my desire for jeans and hooded sweatshirts and I yearn for sandals and sundresses.  I love knowing that something lovely is on the horizon.  Something about the change itself – not just what’s on the other side of that change – excites me.

I’ve long believed (based on nothing but my own certitude) that as human beings we have some emotional need for seasons; that there’s something in our biorhythms that demands the cyclical nature of our seasons.  Some amateur internet sleuthing on this topic quickly disappointed me.  Our seasons have nothing to do with anything but the tilt of the earth’s access.  And we don’t technically need them for any emotional purpose.  People who evolved in cultures located at the equator have no innate knowledge of seasons and don’t “need” winter, spring, or fall any more than I “need” the 365 days of sunshine per year that they have.

Apparently it’s all in my head.

Comedian Daniel Tosh understands this.  He does a bit in his stand-up routine (which you can catch occasionally on Comedy Central) that pokes fun at people like me.  To paraphrase:

Why wouldn’t anyone want to live in LA?  I don’t get those people who say, “Oh, I could never live in LA.  I just need seasons too much.  I could never live in a place that didn’t have seasons.”  Well, to them I say, “I love seasons too.  That’s why I live in a place that skips all the crappy ones.”

That line about needing seasons?  I’ve said it a few hundred times in my life.  And I know many people who share my sentiments.  There is a chance that my “I need seasons” hang-up is just my way of justifying why I continue to live in a place where winter is cold and crappy, and summer is hot and humid.  But I’ve known more than a few people who moved to milder climates and hated it because they could no longer experience the changing seasons.

So what is it then about our human nature that causes us to crave these changes?  If it isn’t biological must it be learned?

Harvard and UCLA psychiatrist John Sharp’s book The Emotional Calendar delves into this question.  And while I haven’t read the book in full, the synopsis of it that I have read nevertheless intrigues me.  Sharp asserts that numerous factors – seasons being chief among them -  influence our “emotional calendars.”  He also points out that when our emotions don’t correspond with the traditional feelings associated with a season we experience an unpleasant dissonance.  But they are the emotional markers – personal experiences that are forever tied to a time of year – that are the greatest influencers of our relationship to any particular season.

For me, though, the seasons themselves still hold meaning.  Something about the smell of a hyacinth blossom or the crunch of fallen leaves under my feet keeps me tuned into the passage of time.  I like that each month feels different than the one that precedes or follows it.  I like the feelings of anticipation at the start of a season, and the feelings of relief at the end.

Sometimes research backs me up and sometimes it doesn’t.  But, as my sister is fond of pointing out, some things don’t have to be fact in order to be true.

Do we need change even when we don’t want it?  If we avoid change now do we pay for it later?  How big does the potential payoff have to be before we will abandon a known quantity for the promise of something better?

I got to thinking about change and its repercussions yesterday in response to Aidan’s post.  Aidan wrote about being stuck; about how we all reach moments in our lives when we feel as though we are spinning our wheels to no avail; about the scarcity of change in the moments we seem to need it most.  Her post wasn’t about change exclusively, but that was the direction I went with the comment I left on her site.  By the time I finished typing my lengthy response I realized that perhaps this topic was worth exploring further on my own turf.

I wrote:

As children, teens, and young adults life provides us with near constant changes and opportunities for growth and evolution. We learn to walk and talk. We learn to ride a bike and play sports. We learn to write in cursive and to multiply. We learn to drive and to think critically. We vote. We go to college. We graduate. We get jobs. We get married. We have kids.

Then, for many of us, we get to our mid-thirties and realize that nothing big has changed in a while. Career is plugging along. Kids are plugging along. We look around and things are much the same as they were five years ago. And we think, “I’m stuck.”

The fact of the matter (I think, anyway) is not that we are stuck, but that we have arrived in a place where life is not doling out big changes all the time. It is now incumbant upon us to make those changes for ourselves. On one hand, this can be very empowering because we are in more control of the changes we experience. On the other hand, it is very easy to stick with the safety of what we know, continue to spin our wheels, and then deal with the frustration of a life that, in rare moments of real truth, perhaps doesn’t live up to its potential.

All change is stressful.  Obviously, bad change is stressful.  But good change is too.  I’m not quoting specific studies, but any good psychologist will tell you this is true.  Given this, I wonder if we are all hardwired with some base level of disinclination toward change.  This doesn’t necessarily ring true to me – that we are all change averse – because I’ve known people who always seem to be looking for change.  But I’ve never met a teenager or a 20-something with these same complaints; that life has stagnated, or that they feel stuck.  It strikes me as a problem unique to adults.

When we are young change is foisted upon us all the time.  And, for the most part, we embrace it.  The responsibility of a drivers license is welcomed because of the freedom it brings.  We may experience nerves and jitters before moving into our freshman dorm, but I think for most of us those nerves are outweighed by the excitement of a new place, new people, and new experiences.  The same holds true for marriage and the happy eagerness we feel awaiting the arrival of a first child.

So why, once life’s big changes have come and gone, do we settle into adulthood without stirring the proverbial pot every so often?  Aidan’s post indicates to me that this wheels-spinning frustration is something that many adults experience.  Why don’t we just make changes then?  If we are able to embrace change when it is barreling toward us regardless of how we might dodge or cower, why can’t we do the same when it is our choice?

I think the easy answer is that by the time we are older, settled into careers, with spouses and children depending on us, the aftershocks of our decisions reach much further.  We have to consider how big changes will affect our families.  But I also think it is easy to lean too heavily on that rationale, transforming it from a consideration into an excuse.

I wrestle with this conundrum too.  I get itchy and twitchy and feel a need to shake things up.  It’s hard.  Sometimes I chicken out.  But in none of the instances when I’ve been brave and made a change that was hard or intimidating, have I ever regretted it.  I need to bear this in mind the next time I want to let change pass me by.

There have been many times in my marriage when I’ve stopped to appreciate the fact that GAP is not a technology junkie. He is certainly a fan of a flat screen television and surround sound. But he is not the type to be constantly upgrading to newer equipment just because it’s available. However, for his recent birthday I took the plunge on his behalf and got him AppleTV.

Since we installed it we have been amazed at the ease of use and instantaneous access to a huge variety of video content. No trips to Blockbuster (ahh, the olden days). No waiting for DVDs to show up in our mailbox. No scanning the DVR to see if there’s anything stashed that might be worth watching. All of this content is available to us with the click of a tiny aluminum remote control. It really is incredible.

GAP and I, however, can’t leave well enough alone. We have to go and wax philosophical about these things. Which is why he said to me last weekend, “Think about how isolating this kind of technology could be.”

Wow. Talk about a buzz kill…

The thing is, though, he’s right. What if you were single and shy? And what if you worked from home? And what if you lived in Manhattan (or some other big city) and could have anything you want delivered right to your door? You could easily live a quite contented existence without ever leaving your home.

I have long sung the praises of doing things alone. In fact, I get a little soapbox-y about it. I think it is a fantastically valuable life skill to be comfortable doing things alone – going to movies or the theatre, going to a sporting event, sitting in a restaurant, traveling, and so on. I really believe that there is much we miss in life if we require a companion for everything. So naturally, when GAP made this statement to me, my wheels went into overdrive. I started thinking about people who may recoil into themselves because they never have to leave the house again. They will lose all of their social skills. We will become a nation of hermits. … I went a bit far afield with it, truth be told.

Then GAP said, “But think about shut-ins. Think about elderly people who literally can’t get out to a movie. Think about how this kind of technology actually connects those people to the world, rather than segregating them from it.” And then, in the span of less than three minutes he was right again. (It can get irritating when he does this.)

In today’s world I’m sure that AppleTV is well beyond the technological capabilities of the nursing home set. But in 10 or 15 years it won’t be. By then our nation’s elderly will be well versed in the internet, video streaming, and on-demand functionality. And when their grandkids come bounding in buzzing about the latest blockbuster, perhaps Grandmother and Granddad will be able to chime right in.

Like everything else in this world, with freedom and privilege comes responsibility. We create new tools and toys faster than we learn how to incorporate them into our culture. With each new advancement we take risks. But we also reap rewards. We must take care not to paint new developments with the brush of “good” or “bad” before we really understand their ramifications. We must wade into these waters carefully.  But at least in the meantime we can enjoy a good movie.

You would think that after nearly 60 years under a female monarch it would be a no brainer for the UK to amend its succession laws.  Not so fast.  It seems it’s more complicated than that.

Mixed into the fuss about Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding (which I’m guilty of following) I came across this article about the laws of succession.  As the law stands today, the firstborn male descendent of the sitting monarch is first in line for the throne.  If Prince William had been a girl, Prince Harry would be on deck after his father, and his sister would be a royal footnote.

Apparently the current law was set into place with the 1701 Act of Settlement.  While I don’t mean to oversimplify things, I’ll go ahead and say that I’m pretty sure things have changed a little bit since then.  Not surprisingly many people find the current laws “antiquated and sexist” so I can only assume that an amendment giving female royal offspring the same rights as their male counterparts would enjoy reasonably broad support.

From my perspective it seems that this is the most opportune time to implement this kind of change.  Since QE2′s first child was male (Prince Charles) and his first child was male (Prince William) changing the law now would do nothing to upset the existing succession plan.  Further, with a long-standing and well-respected queen on the throne I think any argument about how a man is more qualified or suited to fill the role of monarch is basically indefensible.

So if the time is right to make this change, what’s taking so long?  I realize that the British monarchy is not exactly an institution of progressivism and social reform.  But gender discrimination was outlawed in Britain in 1975.  These are hardly cutting edge ideas.  At this point we’re talking about just catching up.  What are the British people and lawmakers holding onto?

The reason this issue interests me is not really because I have a particular interest in the British monarchy – though I will be tuning in for the wedding – but because it piques my curiosity about the way we approach tradition.  The British monarchy is, at this point, a tradition.  It is symbolic.  It is a point of pride and source of comfort for many Britons.  But this sexist aspect of it has lasted into the 21st century for no apparent reason other than as a function of tradition.

I firmly believe that traditions are important and valuable.  They help us stay in touch with our roots.  They remind us of people and places that aren’t with us anymore.  They provide us an intimacy and kinship to our own lives that gives them meaning.  But the thing about traditions is that sometimes we abide by them mindlessly.  Sometimes we forget how they emerged in the first place.  And sometimes they cease to serve their intended purpose and are merely an empty shell of something that doesn’t exist anymore.  And in situations like that – like this – by continuing the tradition we actively honor something that perhaps shouldn’t be honored.

It is hard to break with tradition.  I get that.  But when a tradition can’t be earnestly advocated – when it exists for the sake of tradition alone – that’s when it’s probably time to find the next tradition.