changes aren't good or bad, they are just changes.

Listening to the band,watching the children, and thinking of Tariq -- missing the boy already -- I remembered an incident from the prison. In that other world within a world, back then, I moved into a new prison cell and discovered a tiny mouse there. The creature entered through a cracked air vent, and crept into the cell every night. Patience and obsessional focus are the gems we mine in the tunnels of prison, solitude. Using them and tiny morsels of food, I bribed the little mouse, over several weeks, and eventually trained it to eat from the edge of my hand. When the prison guards moved me from that cell in a routine rotation, I told the new tenant-- a prisoner I thought I knew well -- about the trained mouse. On the morning after the move, he invited me to see the mouse. He'd captured the trusting creature, and crucified it, face down on a cross made from a broken ruler.He laughed as he told me how the mouse had struggled when he'd tied it by its neck to the cross within the cotton thread. He marvelled at how long it had taken to drive thumbtacks into its wriggling paws.

Are we ever justified in what we do? That question ruined my sleep for a long time after I saw the tortured little mouse. When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn't be of our making, but that wouldn't occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said,  were caused by people who tried to change things.