Meg Wolitzer

I'm going to play a short trailer from Daniel Scheffler so you can get a feel for the show and its style.

If you've ever dreamed of wandering the icy blue glaciers of Alaska or climbing a quiet minaret in Samarkand for a secret view of the city below, you need to check out Wayfinder, life-changing travel, wherever you get your podcasts.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Most days don't require big decisions.

We work, eat, sleep, and get ready to do it all again.

But then, every once in a while, we come to a fork in the road.

I'm Meg Wolitzer, and coming up, Selected Shorts brings you fiction about hard choices and profound changes.

Choose the right path and stay with us.

You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

The only constant is change.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote this millennia ago, and the idea still feels elegant and potent.

Heraclitus illustrated his point by adding, "...no one ever steps into the same river twice."

And in our own lives, a lot of change can feel like that, almost imperceptible.

Take aging, for instance.

We almost can't feel it happening, and then suddenly we wake up and we're 40 or 50 or 80 years old.

How did that happen?

I'm a grandmother now, but I feel like going up to my toddler and infant grandchildren and saying, just so both of you know, grandma used to be considered precocious.

Sometimes, though, we come to an inflection point, a proverbial fork in the road.

Maybe it's unexpected.

Maybe we sense it coming on.