Why All the Digging?

Who we are? Why we are? And, the mystery of who we will become can be so exciting to want to discover beforehand that we must shift our gaze from straight ahead to a quick sideways glance. The periphery lends a little context, but then we start to wonder. What were we like when we were little? What were our parents like when they were little? We want to predict who we will become based on who our family members were, where they came from, what their trade was or the battles they fought. We want to know that somewhere along our line there was some grit, a touch of poise and a glimmer of hope.

We want our grandfather’s grandmother to be pleased. Maybe we want to cook like her or speak like him. History has such a lovely veil upon it—we can’t help but look longingly back to a people who were likely quite like us with our gifts and our passions, our faults and our distractions.

What is it that we hope to uncover within those dusty volumes, those stone rubbings and those yellowed files? It is always a curiosity—like the moon. It is another one of the many distractions we have compiled, I suppose, to sweep us away from the actual sweeping—to forget what planet we are on for a while. I guess that’s not so bad.