A Moment in Time
This crossroad of humanity seems like a perfect moment in time to reach out and connect with you. Not sure where you are, if and when you will see these words, but no matter the distance or time zone difference, today more than ever I feel you and I know you feel me too.
It looks like time travels only in one direction now. A wall of some makeshift purgatory has locked us here behind our windows, entryways and masks, frightened and perplexed. All our lives we’ve been encouraged to look ahead and move forward, but these days we only yearn to go back. We look back and are relentlessly ending all of our conversations with “when things go back to normal again.”
I keep remembering that post, “Be grateful, so many people pray for what you have!”
How real does it feel now as we look back at lives we had only weeks ago? I suppose, this is how people in many war and disaster stricken regions - usually too far for us to be concerned about, feel like.
This truly is a collective down, but as all other downs it reminds us what an up looks like. For reasons that are beyond my understanding, we are unable to employ a sense of gratitude and empathy profound enough for our collective and individual survival, unless every now and then we experience a profound loss.
As the wave of this virus began to crush walls of our modern life, largely founded on convenient forgetfulness, arrogance and naïveté, our urgency to acquire the latest tech gadget is now replaced with need to find the best face mask... A strong pinch of deja vu triggers a remembrance. I’ve seen this before.
And here I look back, in time...
As communist regimes across Eastern Europe began collapsing like dominoes, followed by political and geographic restructuring within individual countries and the region itself, transition was not smooth nor peaceful in every case. Smaller and larger conflicts began to emerge, and the heat of fire, destruction and bloodshed was getting ever closer to home. Part in denial, part true disbelief, we sort of waited and hoped for the best, almost to the very moment that first grenades crashed my neighborhood and my hometown in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This is a larger story and when examined closely it reveals countless warming signs and factors, which directly and indirectly contributed to rise in tensions and conflict, ultimately resulting in the most devastating war in Europe since WW II. I didn’t understand a lot of it at the time but getting through my teen years in a war zone left me with so many questions and a haunting need to answer them. What leads to such unfortunate events around the world? Can they be prevented and how? Could we have done something differently before they escalated? Years later after my family settled here in Chicago and I got to college, I spent most of my higher education searching for answers.
I can’t say that I found them all. However, I was left with a strong conviction that threads through all the conflicts and disasters near and far, including the one we are experiencing right now - none of them are irrelevant or too distant to matter and affect us. Ignoring them long enough will most likely bring them home. And when that happens, we will be unprepared to effectively respond.
Universe always speaks to us. At times her voice appears distant and not so pressing, but if we possessed enough wisdom, we’d turn up the volume before she had to. When she finally does, we often lose so much that it looks more like punishment than a lesson we needed to learn.
And there are many we need to learn today. For sake of our humanity and this planet, I truly hope that we do.
