Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives.

Your past is not your potential. In any hour you can choose to liberate the future.

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by agreement or by emotional appeal.

Power is a central issue in social and personal transformation. Our sources and uses of power set our boundaries, give form to our relationships, even determine how much we let ourselves liberate and express aspects of the self. More than party registration, more than our purported philosophy or ideology, personal power defines our politics.

So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves.

By definition, revolutions are not linear, one step at a time, event A leading to event B, and so on. Many causes operate on each other at once. Revolutions shift into place suddenly, like the pattern in a kaleidoscope. They do not so much proceed as crystallize.

We cannot leave the trap until we know we are in it.