Hey there, it's Maggie. For the next two weeks of episodes, the poet Samir Bashir will be guest hosting The Slowdown. I hope you enjoy her selections and reflection. I'll return on February 18th.

I'm Samia Bashir, and this is the slowdown.

I started this decade on fellowship in Rome, and I was feeling hopeful about our future. Even while Northern Italy slowly began to break down under the weight of a newly spreading

coronavirus.

This was the dawning Chinese Year of the Rat, the first animal in the eastern zodiac, representing new beginnings.

Well, a whole lot most certainly began that year, and here we are now, deep in the midst of it all.

In a few days, we enter the Chinese year of the firehorse, strength, independence, passion, and transformation. I think we're

ready for that shift. It's been a couple thousand Gregorian years since Roman Emperor Julius Caesar

famously crossed the Rubicon, a small river in northern Italy, marking a point of no return in what felt at that time like a major world war.

Before that step, Caesar was governor of a single Roman territory. His term was ending, and he'd been ordered to surrender his troops.

Instead, he defied the senators and the laws of the people by marching his army into

Rome proper, setting the stage for the Roman Civil War.

By war's end, Caesar had become dictator for life.

Crossing the Rubicon has long been a widely used idiom.

It refers to having stepped over a line or passed a point of no return.

We use it to say that one has taken the final step into dangerous waters from which there is no retreat.

Once that line has been crossed, nothing will ever be the same. A new beginning of a certain kind.

I think we've held on to this idiom where we crossed the point of no return to remind us that pain is not, in fact, an end, but can instead be the beginning of a terrible cycle.

This is where we break something that can take ages, perhaps even millennia, to repair.

But repair we must. Our work, in fact, might be bigger than holding up a sign that says,

do not cross, but to be prepared for the crossing. Sometimes, history tells us, that crossing is inevitable. Something in our nature

refuses to prevent it. The light, however, lies in the fact that we can recognize it. We can stand

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