Love is hard to explain.

When you fall in love with a person or a place or a thing, who can say why?

A few years ago, I fell madly in love with a piece of music.

This was during the COVID pandemic when there was still a lot of mask wearing, a lot of social isolation, a lot of music. This was during the COVID pandemic when there was still a lot of mask

wearing, a lot of social isolation, a lot of death, but also glimmers of hope. I am a sucker for

hope. I went to a concert around Christmas time with my wife and some friends, and the music I heard

that night jacked up my hope meter to 11.

It was a great feeling, especially when there was so much uncertainty and darkness, so much fear of the future. The older I get, the more I realize that fear of the future is essentially

a default condition of humankind. One thing I've learned from interviewing historians over the years is that

the historical outcomes that seem obvious today were not always obvious in the moment. The rise or

fall of a given empire or institution was rarely a foregone conclusion. If one or two decisions had gone

another way were one battle or marriage or

pregnancy, the outcome might have been different. But when you're standing in the present,

it's hard to see where the future lies. If you sense there is an ill wind blowing, you assume it will

keep blowing in the same direction and that things will only

get worse.

So we make all sorts of predictions based on uncertainty and fear.

Maybe that's what allows us to so easily abandon our kindness to people who aren't like us

and to justify acts of exclusion, which brings me back to the people and the places and the things

that we fall in love with. Why can only some of us love certain things? That piece of music

that I fell in love with, it is an 18th century Christian oratorio called Messiah by George Friedrich

Handel. In some circles, it is very famous, so you may

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