What is history and culture to us all? is it something we venerate because we can never do anything to change it. is it because it is far from our reach and yet so unsettlingly close? Growing up I had a fascination or let me say an obsession concerning history and later it expanded to mythologies, I would read anything I could find on ancient civilizations. My attention was mainly focused on Ancient Greek, Egypt and Rome. I had this story where I grew up around dig sites and would eventually become an archeologist.
In time where life was going upside down, such ancient stories held me together, I grew to form a connection with people I will never meet, individuals that were bones by the time I was born and yet the thirst to know and understand their existence helped understand mine.
From the great accounts of Hatshepsut to the exploits of Cleopatra paved my own resilience to pave my own path. They are often depicted as monumental historical figures and yet in their times when they were still flesh and blood, they were women fighting a system, they fought it in their ways. At that time, it probably felt like a footprint in the sand, which will be erased with time and the wind. And yet today their very existence is footprint enough.
To me they were such the greatest heroes that ever lived, not because of how great they were but of how they transcended it. from Alexander to Constantine The Great, they were more alive to me than my next-door neighbor. their lives were about living to above certain mindset or stereotype. i wonder do we set out to do something knowing it can resonate a hundred years from now? i have read stories of those that never lived to witness the manifestation of their work. and yet someone who lived in those very privilege is grateful to someone they never met.
Those were the thoughts running through my head when I was 18 years old, when I accidentally fell upon Rick Warren’s book “Purpose Driven Life”. This gnawing feeling in my heart there was much to be done and yet no idea how to go about it. was the anger I felt when I saw a book in the trashcan or pages burnt to make a fire enough? Was that burden my purpose? That I had something to protect and preserve? Or just a beginning.
Five years later and I am nowhere around a concrete answer. Or maybe I mis-defined what the answer was? is it career? When you are rich? When you are well connected? At 18 years of age I found the will to start that journey and now I am just trying to keep going forward. I think the more I grew older the more I found out that a difference is that one small action and that one person you help out, but don’t let it ever be enough.
P.S: The image is of the Great Sphynx of Giza, one of my favorite historical monuments.
