Everyone has a wealth of opinions about Change. It's good and it's bad: I love sending email to friends in England. I hate those damn towers they're putting up everywhere so people can talk on the phone in their cars. I love riding a bike on a woodland trail. I hate the fact that each day there's less woodland to be in. But, in general, I think I like change, at least the kind that doesn't require stepping too far outside my own "comfort zone." Americans seem to like change. When something is changing, it belongs to the present, so maybe we like it because we're stuck in what a guy in this month's Utne Reader calls "our doe-eyed preoccupation with the now."

Having said that, is it my imagination, or is the Now itself getting smaller, or at least narrower? One of my new favorite expressions was uttered by a teen-ager recently. She said, disparagingly, "Oh, that is just so fifteen minutes ago!" Of course, every generation thinks the next is growing up too quickly, and that Things in General are moving waaay too fast. But we really are getting much better at speeding things up. I remember my dad saying "people these days just can't stand to wait!" What would he think if I told him I'd just paid over 300 bucks for a couple of little black things to plug into my computer, just so stuff would come up on the screen a few seconds faster?

Are things in my life (or yours) any different today? Maybe we're all some penny wise and pound foolish, about change big and small. Maybe that's the big problem with Change.