“He tilted his head, his brow furrowed. “So how do you think we win?” I stared at him for a moment, weighing the question, the enormity of it. Outside, the landscape blurred past, indifferent to the weight of our conversation. I leaned back in my seat, folding my arms across my chest. “We win,” I said slowly, “by allowing ourselves to be wrong and having the courage to then get it right. Then one day being fine with that version of right not being enough and being comfortable with doing more. Changing more. Being better. We stop balancing and choose.” He repeated my last words, “We choose,” as though the phrase itself were a revelation, a mantra he was learning to carry. He said it again, softer this time, almost to himself, as if tasting the truth for the first time.”
From “An Odyssey by Rail,” a beautiful and meditative read by Frederick Joseph on train travel, the tensions of existing and traveling in America as a Black, chronically ill man, chance encounters, and the gift of attention.
