“You look like one of them”

Apparently, the clothes I’m wearing suggest I’m a member of a Black bloc.  After shredding my other trousers in a bike crash now I’m wearing all black and a patterned Palestinian style scarf.  I never liked wearing all black.  I always thought it showed a lack of imagination and a propensity for the macabre but, it is extremely practical as backup when traveling.

I forget his name, but he was far from forgettable.

“Maybe I should change my image” I said.

He put me on the spot, being deliberately argumentative, trapping me in corners and making my ideas sound insignificant, but when I was ok with being uncomfortable I could understand that the provocations were intellectual, rather than personal and in the end I was more interested in what he had to say, than in answering his questions.  It’s refreshing to be challenged and made to question what it is that you’re here to do, because if you don’t know, that’s what you should be trying to figure out.  Some people don’t like a challenge, but I certainly do.  I’m reminded of something that seems relevant here, and something we should try to remember when our egos are confronted,

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) “Maxims for Revolutionists”

Perhaps it’s ironic that I would perceive him this way when it was him that suggested I was wearing the uniform of a revolutionary.