There’s an old saying: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”
Looking at old photos, it’s hard not to feel a kind of
wanderlust. The pang of nostalgia, for lost times that lingers at the back of
your mind.
The past is a foreign country… you may sit on the bench
by the side of the road and watch the locals passing by, who achieved and lost
meanings before any of us arrived here. They sleep in the same house as we do,
look up at the same stars, and breathe the same air, with the same blood in
their veins… and yet, they lived in a completely different world.
The past is a world covered in dust from the frontier.
A world of people whose life is hammered out by fate. The world of lost souls,
where the fire still lights in the evening, of conversations over mundane hopes.
You’d watch as they carried on with their lives that seems so important, even
if their stories have already been told, even if any of it risks no other way
than the way it happened… But they carry on anyway.
The past is a foreign country, and we’re only tourists…
We can’t expect to understand the locals, or why they do what they do. We can
only ask them politely to hold still, so we can capture a photo to take home
with us, so we can sit for a minute in a world of black and white, with clean
borders that protects us from the ravages of time. Like a tide pool, just out of
the reach of the wave, that lets you linger in a moment of awe. So clear and still,
you can see your own reflection…
