Author Anaïs Nin said: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” and “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”

Today I want to say this. This woman totally rocked. With just these two sentences—one about the power of the individual and one about the power of community—she changed my world. She changed me by saying something that I didn’t know—or that I’d lost along the way—and by inviting me to remember how amazing we humans can be.

As writers, we worry about all sorts of strange things. We worry about not having enough time to write and that we’re spending far too much time on our writing. We worry about internal and external critics and national and family politics. We worry about our own over-education and also our own remarkable cluelessness in any given moment. We worry about the state of our planet, country, neighborhood, and desk. We worry about how prolific we are on any given day and month and year. Some days I think this makes us unique. Most days I suspect this just makes us human.

Today I want to say this.

It’s not the worry that lasts. (And I expect Anaïs Nin—who once wrote erotica for $1/page so she could afford to eat—would agree with me.)

What lasts is this.

We change the world.

We change the world with just two sentences. We change things as both a lens on the world and as friends and neighbors within it. I think that totally rocks.

We are more powerful than we can remember alone. How cool is that?