"Shining true and smiling back at all who wait to cross. There is no loss."
~ Kansas, The Wall
On This Day in History, November 9, 1989: "East German officials today opened the Berlin Wall, allowing travel from East to West Berlin..."
And that's not all this date carries, for those who might look, for those who remember.
We get to choose.
We get to choose what sort of a November 9 THIS one is going to be.
I feel we are choosing already, many of us. I'm personally choosing the same thing I chose yesterday, in what might feel like an imperfectly perfect kind of a way (that's why we chose to be human).
We can simply choose to choose Love.L-O-V-E
The choice doesn't need to appear to be perfect. Just by existing, it IS. It's about honest, heartfelt intent, in the most human of ways.
I remember early November 1989, perhaps more in feelings than in details. It was like some kind of a Miracle, back then, inexplicable, yet Real.
How could it be?
It simply was.
I remember the years leading up to it. I remember the years that came after. No, not all the details. I remember the feelings.
On November 10, they started tearing the wall down. I DO remember at least some of those details. I was 25 years old. And I had recently fallen myself - that Fall, I had fallen in love. I remember studying the images, astonished. They didn't arrive quite as rapidly in those days, but still, we all watched. I remember the front page of the newspaper. I remember the evening news. And we did already have cable.
We tended to believe back then that the wall would never actually fall (except through the madness of mutual destruction). I remember a friend telling me what it was like to have visited there, how forbidding it actually was - traveling there wasn't needed to feel it - we felt it in plenty of ways. Falling like that, truthfully, it wasn't even "a concept", for a very long time, not for most of us. As long as many of us could remember, that wall simply >was<. Yet fall it did. And it all came about in a way nobody expected.
It's time to begin.
It's time to continue.
We get to choose.
November 9.
Photo from July 1, 1988, permitted use with this attribution from Wikimedia Commons: By Neptuul (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
