Because of my mentors who studied the limits to growth and pointed out that growth cannot continue forever on a finite planet, I have lived for twenty years or more knowing that transformation was coming.

The one thing that has been sure is that one day we'd stop moving in the direction we have been moving. Maybe it would be deliberate, gradual, and controlled, chosen collectively.

Maybe it would be imposed by the physics of the planet or the limits of human tolerance. Maybe it would be sudden, and traumatic.

So whenever I meet someone who has lived through transformation (a major one like the fall of a government or a little one like a business or personal crisis) I am always very curious.

Not just intellectually curious, but curious like someone studying for a coming test.

People present for the fall of the Soviet Union tell me that they did not see it coming. I have one friend, who was a young adult in W. Germany at the time who says her family was preparing a room for distant cousins who were going to try to escape from the East.

They were doing this preparation just days before the fall of the Berlin wall, with no idea that in a few more days the cousins would just be able to walk across the line where the wall had been.

Another friend, a dissident at the time in the former Czechoslovakia, told me about how the repression was at its strongest weeks before that government fell. Everyone had stopped believing the story of the communists, my friend said, but everyone thought they were the only one.

And then there are my own experiences. The workplace bully who seemed invincible until one person stood up. The person I always trusted, until I didn't. The injustice that was invisible to me until it wasn't, and then could not be unseen.

I keep thinking of all of these transitions, big and small, lately. I keep turning them around in my head as though these transitions of the past will make current events more intelligible.

I can't say they have, really. I'm no more able to foresee the future than my friends from Germany or Czechoslovakia were, I guess. But it seems worth remembering that its not that easy to see transformation even when it's happening.

It's worth remembering that today doesn't always blend on to tomorrow in a smooth continuous way.

It's worth remembering that what appears to be strong may in fact be so weak and brittle as to be about to fall apart.

It's worth remembering that when you feel small and alone, everyone else might feel that way too, and in fact you might be a speck in massive, gathering wave.

And it's worth remembering that truths, once witnessed, once spoken aloud, sometimes, cannot be pulled back in.

Hang on tight, stay awake, be brave, and try to make out the shape of the coming future. Better yet, try to say aloud what you know to be true, so that you might, perhaps, if you are to be so lucky, help shape that future.