Before today, there was only one other MLK Day weekend that had stuck in my mind. We were on a family ski trip and on the ride north we stopped at McDonald’s. They had the radio on announcing that the United States had just invaded Kuwait. It was a bit surreal being in McDonald’s of all places, hearing George Bush instead of the ka-ching of the registers.

I was in 11th grade and confused how we were going skiing and going to have fun when our country was doing something really not fun. I guess you could say that was the first day I started to think about that continuum we all live on, that small space where we exist and thrive despite all of the horrors and evils and disappointments that life can bring. We thrive because we can see the other end, the end of possibilities and newness and happiness. In order to keep moving forward, we perch ourselves delicately between the good and the bad, aiming more towards hope than towards despair.

I’ll also remember this MLK Day and its long weekend, but for a better reason. Today at 12pm EST, CNN rebroadcast the entirety of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

When the speech started, I had my laptop on in my lap thinking I would be able to tinker away at some things I needed to do, as not to waste a chance to multitask. About a minute into the speech, I closed my laptop and set it aside. Some things need your full attention, this is one of them.

And a few minutes in, I started crying and felt so very different than I did around this time 18 years ago. Instead of feeling estranged and wondering what the hell was going on in a McDonald’s in Virginia, I felt happy and hopeful. I know that tomorrow the wars aren’t going to stop and the economy isn’t going to right itself and that millions of people will still need food, water and shelter.

But today there’s a sliding towards the plus end of the scale away from the minus. Not because tomorrow we’re going to go to bed richer or kinder than the day before, but because tomorrow, for the first time in a long time, we’ll see our country move forward along with us.