We are living what will be known in the future as history. Us, with all our secret struggles and secret fears. With all our hopes, all our dreams for the future, all for us. All the selfish things we want even as we’re afraid of the world ending around us, afraid that working to get those things is a mistake, afraid of the people who might turn against us for those things when or if the world ends.
Us, with all our memories, all our disparate lives. With all the groups we see playing out their arguments around us as we disagree and disagree and disagree, as we have our views that we say and our views that we hide. As we side ourselves with one group or another, but never to complete agreement in our hearts. As we love, fiercely, and fight for those we don’t agree with, or don’t agree with completely. As we wonder how to balance that and loving ourselves, trying to find the winning solution as we disagree on whether everyone can win and what kind of win is most important.
Us, living the lives in front of us. Washing the dishes, feeding the pets, raising our kids, celebrating our small successes, putting out the fires that show up every day. Taking a break from it all to laugh at little, inconsequential things, and enjoy how little and consequential they are. To imagine ourselves in a different world, full of things we wish we could have in this world, built in a way we long for this world to be built. To eat breakfast or forget to eat breakfast as we work on something that ignites our passion. Vacuuming and taking out the trash even as we wonder if anything we do will be any good, if it will matter with what’s going on around us. Seeing our fridge full again after a grocery trip, satisfied with knowing that, whatever else is going on, we have what we need.
Remember this, as you live in it. History is so often remembered through events, through the decisions and actions of a few people the world has deemed most important, but this is not history.
History is people.
And people have lived a glorious, contradictory mosaic of lives ever since history began.
