When I heard that the theme of this year's JALT Conference was to be Crossing Borders, my heart sang. The idea resonates at so many levels and in so many ways: the physical, the cultural, the political, the geographical, the psychological, the social, the personal -- and that is without even beginning to consider what might be seen as the core, professional borders of language and pedagogic style which we cross daily in our necessarily cross-cultural TESOL activities. One challenge, then, when responding to the theme, is to find a constant -- something to hold onto which will give coherence to one's ideas as one crosses so many borders.