Dear PiePie,
I recently read The Way We Live Now, a wonderful piece of essay by Colson Whitehead published in the New York Times 2 months after September 11th. What he wrote about New York City is true for any city that you have treaded through. Perhaps the speed of change in the physical landscape is not quite as fast in the Big Apple, but the wheels of time, you shall soon realise, spins ever faster the older you get.
We are voyagers in this world, navigating through a fog of war, but as we lay our eyes for the first time on a restaurant or library or new apartment, that becomes seared in our memories. That place, will forever be where we ate, read and lived, regardless of what came before, or after.
We will reminisce with those who knew that place as we knew – oftentimes people our age – about the things we use to do, at the places those used to be. Even as older folks smile knowingly about even more distant “used to be”.
In that way, the world we build, is our own, but also, shared with the people of our times. The voyagers who saw, for the first time as well, what we saw. Generations have a zeitgeist, a collective experience, rooted in a shared knowing.
The world is more fragmented than before, but I hope, more travel, and seeing how ‘the other’ lives, bridges those gaps. We simply are, voyagers.
Love, Dad