If you look into the wide open eyes of a baby you will see it. You will see the miracle, the promise, and the unknown.
You don't believe it? Look at a picture of yourself from when you were a newborn, eyes barely wide open...and you WILL see it.
As those new eyes wonder, taking the world in, the story of life has not been told - yet. For those eyes, lights and colors blend in infinite variations, slowly settling on the clearest of minds.
This is the beginning of everything, before the world begins rushing in, captured in fleeing flashes of memory. This is when every human being’s potential is still untainted by translations, interpretations, and contradictions.
This is where every human being - regardless of their social and cultural coordinates - begins their journey through life, navigating wants, needs, and dreams as they float along, carried by the most powerful currents of time: the flow of nature and the undertows of human lives as they meet, join, or crash into each other in a continuous rush of infinite destinations, as they get lost and being found, and lost again…between the implacable waves of time.
Look into the eyes of a young baby to remember sorrows from your past and to hope of new beginnings as those eyes peer back at you and through you, into the unknown, searching for a destination, watching the future emerge from the newest of meanings.
We are all moving through time, sailing the high and low tides of nature and man-made destinies.
While nature has its own rhythm and pace, the stories of our collective destiny are in our minds to imagine and in our hands to craft. Our sailing time is short and precious; our dreams, the sweetest playful dance of hope and innocence.
Remember this dance. Protect it. Make absolutely sure that those who follow you will not have their future trapped by your past. Share the story of our kind both in honesty and kindness, then let it fade away in time, making space for the new dreamers to find each other and together dream a better way than ours.
Just like Goethe, I agree that we must give the children of the world two vital gifts: roots and wings. However, we must ensure that their new roots are not our old beliefs or convictions, because our old ways are like heavy chains and anchors dragged through the bottom of life's timeless ocean.
Anchors are the antithesis of wings. Beliefs and dogmas are incompatible with visionary and creative wisdom.
Our role is not to preserve the old, but to protect the new from our old ways no matter how attached we are to our ways. It is against the natural order of things to seek immortality by sacrificing future generations in the name of our ideologies.
I admire and have tremendous respect for those who journey around the Earth and capture moments of human life, granting us all a view of the world whispered within each frame; telling the stories unfolding at the boundaries between the past and the future.
AP Images Blog — AP Photos:
Share this post