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resolutions. Later, I carried signs demanding the release of Ukrainian prisoners of conscience from Soviet prison camps. Today, I am experiencing perhaps the ulti mate vindication: I get to assist the president of the United States as he welcomes President Victor Yu shchenko, leader of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, to the Oval Office. No longer do I (or millions of Ukrainians or Ukrainian Americans like me) have to prove anything to anyone. OK, so now that that’s been said, I return to the issue of keeping a diary, an activity whose pur pose at my age is a question still to be answered. What, after all, can happen in the next three or even four decades that can top the events I’ve already experienced? Is it even possible to imagine some thing more exciting than what I’ve been doing until now? And if the future doesn’t measure up to the past, is it worth the time and trouble to commit it to a floppy disk? I can’t say for sure, but I suspect I will have different things to write about these days. At 50, "meaningful" is not the same as it was at 13, and my diary entries are likely to reflect this. Great world events or great adventures may continue to make up the fabric of my life, but I suspect that it will be the little details, the small insights, and the personal realizations that will take center stage in my new diary. Who knows? What I do know is that I embark on this di ary writing with several decades of hindsight and experience and am fully prepared to start listening to the quiet inner voice that comes to the surface of my consciousness now and then and hints at new details and insights. Sometimes the voice comes at an inop portune time and place: is it really possible to start daydreaming during bilateral negotiations concern ing weapons of mass destruction about plans to transform my concrete sliver of a balcony into a summer garden? At times, the voice is more insis tent, often when I return home from yet another trip to Ukraine (about 75 trips in 15 years). Sometimes it practically screams: time to make friends with your kitchen and actually start using all those cookbooks you’ve been collecting over the years. I’ve recently noticed that the voice no longer urges me to spend the weekend poring over technical dictionaries in preparation for a work meeting. Seems that Saturday mornings have somehow become reserved for yoga classes, and Sunday afternoons are for attending classical music concerts. These are adult choices that I allow myself to make, different certainly from the choices that propelled me at 13. And they will color the contents of my new diary. I’m hoping my new diary entries will be a record not only of what I do, but why I do it; not only an exploration of events, but of motivations. Perhaps this diary will shed light not only on people I meet, but on the person I seem to know the least: me. And if I diligently record all the small details of my life and look very carefully, I might be lucky enough to see a picture of someone with a rich and balanced and varied existence. There are, after all, degrees and variations to that thing we call personal satisfaction. It can come from those first few excit ing days of the Orange Revolution on the Maidan with the masses of brave Ukrainians, but it can also come from growing the perfect juicy red tomato on my city apartment balcony. Marta N. Zielyk January 3, 2006
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