To Touch the Past . . .
The past is all around us, for we have inherited a world made by others before us, sometimes literally as in the buildings, roads, schools, and neighborhoods that we encounter in our everyday lives, and sometimes indirectly, as in the social and economic forces that our parents, and their parents, confronted, that they unleashed, or that they tamed. You don't have to stand in front of a fancy building to appreciate the construction that has taken place before us in building up the world we live in. And you do not have to go somewhere else and buy a ticket or stand in line to see the past. It is right in front of you. Often, we just need to stop to notice the past and its remnants and thereby start to appreciate how pervasive the legacy of the past is. Just as importantly we must pause to ponder what those remnants mean, what lessons they can impart to us. Otherwise they are just sticks and stones, devoid of the meaning and life that their builders and users breathed into them every day.
Before we close our eyes to the history that surrounds us, we need to remember that history belongs to us all. It does not lie only in the dusty pages of the archives or in the velvet roped museums. Remember these things:
1. Everyone is someone.
2. Every place is someplace.
3. Every place and every person has a story.
4. Every story has a larger meaning if only we look to find it.
The following images are common features of our world, features that I have encountered in my work and in my ramblings. I do not go into the stories here that each one represents (I do that elsewhere), but I invite you to think of where each one of the objects, crafted by the hand of people, comes from and what it means to us today. For when we touch the past around us, we are also touching something that someone, a living, breathing human being, someone who had hungers and needs, someone who had dreams and fears, someone who knew satisfaction and who knew frustration, created, used, and left for the future. It is up to us to learn from the past, to shape the future with those lessons in mind, and to leave those remnants for others generations to continue to learn from.
Before we close our eyes to the history that surrounds us, we need to remember that history belongs to us all. It does not lie only in the dusty pages of the archives or in the velvet roped museums. Remember these things:
1. Everyone is someone.
2. Every place is someplace.
3. Every place and every person has a story.
4. Every story has a larger meaning if only we look to find it.
The following images are common features of our world, features that I have encountered in my work and in my ramblings. I do not go into the stories here that each one represents (I do that elsewhere), but I invite you to think of where each one of the objects, crafted by the hand of people, comes from and what it means to us today. For when we touch the past around us, we are also touching something that someone, a living, breathing human being, someone who had hungers and needs, someone who had dreams and fears, someone who knew satisfaction and who knew frustration, created, used, and left for the future. It is up to us to learn from the past, to shape the future with those lessons in mind, and to leave those remnants for others generations to continue to learn from.