One thing

...leads to another. Two evenings ago, as Cleo was carefully pasting the last of a series of sticker puzzle pieces into a two-page spread in her Curious George activity book, I started to fiddle with the remainder of the sticker page - with the pliable, adhesive negative space from which the stickers had been pulled. Tear here, hold there, push against forehead: and suddenly we were masked bandits, or monsters, in search of an unsuspecting victim named L.

Or this. While driving to pick Cleo up from school on Wednesday, I heard the brief, catchy refrain of a pop song on the car radio. "God is a DJ, " the singer happily announced, "and life is a dance floor." Not knowing the source, I turned the analogy over in my head for a few minutes - life as performance; nature as music - and then forgot all about it. Yesterday, though, as Cleo and L. stacked Duplos in the aquarium play space, I picked up a weekend supplement of the paper, and read about a local musician who named as influences Massive Attack and Faithless. I know Massive Attack well, and sometimes play their beguiling 'Teardrop' before classes. Faithless, though? That name required some internet research, and when I had a half hour this morning, I soon found that Faithless - also known, like Massive Attack, for music that draws on trip-hop ad trance - is especially well known for a collaboration with a rapper that was titled... "God is a DJ."

The next step is not always manifest in this moment. But often enough life is rather like a dance, in that one step leads fluidly - instinctively; naturally - into the next.