On My Mind

Cancelled

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There were enough signs that aligned (or didn’t) that we knew before we admitted we knew: We would not be travelling to Peru as we planned. It was 4am when we first broached the subject and 11am when we made the decision. We’d booked the trip six months earlier and had talked about it for at least six months before that. But the universe just didn’t turn the way we needed it to turn.

We cried, realizing we were giving up on a dream. There will be other dreams, of course, but dreams are the things that grab hold of us and that’s what makes them so hard to let go.

Over the subsequent days, I realized that I was still sad. I woke up in the mornings wishing I were still asleep, not ready to face yet another day here, when everything I had been looking forward to was somewhere else.

We’ve gone out every day and watched spring coming into full force. I’ve cooked some nice things.

My favourite area in Weimar is the forest close to our flat and I brought my journal there one day. It helps me breathe a little more easily.

When life doesn’t go according to plan, it provides us all sorts of opportunities to realign and readjust. This is a chance to look at my own behaviour and actions in the face of a disappointment and behave differently next time. That’s real life, and there will be a great deal more of it that does not go according to plan.

It its own messy way, that’s what makes it beautiful.

Germany

Counting the Living

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Back in 2020, I read a New York Times article about a crowdsourced, online project to digitize records with the Arolsen Archives, the keepers of the world’s largest archive on victims and survivors of National Socialism (Nazism). The goal of the #everynamecounts initiative is to create a digital memorial with records accessible to all.

With thousands of volunteers around the world, I type whatever information there is. Sometimes I’m familiar with the names because of the community I grew up in and where I live now. Sometimes I recognize locations. One project involved documenting records of prisoners held in the concentration camp Buchenwald. I live within cycling distance of Buchenwald and have been up there more than a handful of times.

I most enjoy working on records of displaced people. These are the survivors, the young children with huge names, the defiant elders, the unbreakable adults. The documents indicate where they came from, and where they were sent to, and when. People were living in DP facilities until the early 1950s. Sailed to New York. Flight to London.

I wonder about the workers who took down these records, the handwriting of people all over the world, the very human touch of both condemning and saving a life. There is handwriting that loops and weaves, handwriting that took the time, handwriting that scratched and scrawled. Name. Marital status. Birthplace. Last address. Location. There are typed records, too, an indication that all of this happened in a world different from ours, yet not so long ago.

As I record lives lost and lives saved, I think about the internationalism of these records. Europe in ruins, its condemned minorities and those unlucky enough to have a non-conformist opinion collected and shipped off. To somewhere. Europe’s ravaged population surviving wherever they ended up, many so far from home.

And the internationalism of 175,000 volunteers around the world who painstakingly transcribe documents holding the stories of 17.5 million people. To guard against mistakes, each document is read by several volunteers. Any areas that cannot be read according to the usual guidelines are then checked by a member of the Arolsen Archives team. Seventeen and a half million individuals and their stories are too precious for error.

Two weeks ago, quite by accident, we drove past the town where the International Centre on Nazi Persecution, home of the Arolsen Archives, is located. I transcribed a few more documents the next day.

Every name counts.

View from the Buchenwald Memorial – March 2022
On My Mind

Bad Day

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I caught up to a new colleague while cycling home through the park last week. We’d had our first real conversation just weeks earlier at a wine tasting, which led us to meet in a café days later to continue our conversation. Like many of us who move around, she was looking to find her people. We’re a small school without much transience, and I appreciate that this can be hard to do. I was new once, too.

As one does, I asked about her day and was surprised by the response. “Actually it wasn’t that great,” she said, and I asked if she wanted to tell me more. We rode together until the path forked and I continued towards home.

She’d had a bad day and thanked me for talking about it with her. I was happy to listen, had related some of my own experiences, and had tried to ask questions that might prompt a change of perspective. It wasn’t until I was cycling home the next day, alone, that I realized how seldomly we actually answer the question, “How was your day?”.

I had an administrator once whose classic reply was, “Do you care?”, meant to prompt the asker into thinking about the question. That there’s only one real answer to that question presents its own difficulties. Based on personal observation, Germans tend to avoid the question entirely and just ask how you are. Whether talking about one’s day factors into the answer is purely optional.

Thinking about it from this perspective, I was flattered that my colleague had given me a real answer. It had meant some vulnerability on her part, and that’s not easy with people we’re trying to get to know. But that is the way to get to know people, according to the social penetration theory that my psychology students and I study. Relationships tend to move from superficial and shallow to deeper and more intimate, and people tend to like individuals who share more deeply, leading them to do so in return.

Through the conversation about the bad day, my colleague and I learned a little bit more about each other. We found some commonalities, recognized that others are there for us when we’re open to them, and strengthened a connection. And that’s not a bad way to begin building a friendship.

Photos, travels, musings, and ideas on education by someone trying to make the world a better and more peaceful place