On Becoming

An essay on the two forces at the heart of change. Becoming, here, is not drift but the tension between something that pulls a life toward form and something that resists it, the interplay that produces a self over time. The piece names these forces and watches them work, treating personal change as the visible result of an underlying dynamic rather than a matter of will alone. It sits among the On——ing essays as one of the more structural entries, closer to the physics of the framework than the lyric of it, concerned with the mechanism by which a person is continually made.

It rewards a reader who comes to it after the fourth journal, since the two forces it watches are a close cousin of the triad's tension. Where much of the series describes states, this essay describes a process, and it is one of the clearest places to see the framework's machinery turning underneath the lyric.

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