Walls Up, Walls Down

Walls Up, Walls Down

    Time seems to move by so quickly.  Three years ago came the nuclear disaster at Fukushima (Japan just announced that it will reopen 2 reactors in the southern part of the country); and today marks the 25th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.  Memory plays tricks on us, our memories vivid with watching the jubilant people with hammers and bars, reaching out to the hands of those in the eastern side, then big chunks of the wall actually crumbling down.  A quarter of a century melting into a time not long ago.

    We, as humans, have a long history with walls, some built to keep people out, some built to keep people in.  Hadrian's wall, the Great Wall of China, the walls bordering Mexico, the walls separating the West Bank in Israel (that particular wall just passed its 12th anniversary)...each marking our efforts to build homes, forts and prisons.  In Bill Bryson's book Home, he talks of the first wall in a home being the one that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house (prior to that, the interior of homes did not have walls to divide rooms...no separate bedrooms, closets or bathrooms).  From there came other walls, fences and all sorts of other barriers.  And for some of us, the walls came up internally.

    In my game, Perceptions, one question was of parachuting into a field late at night and after walking for awhile, coming to a fence that seemed miles long in both directions...at that point, would you feel that you were being kept out of an area or being kept in?  We tend to do much the same with our own views, building walls inside ourselves to overcome or to block others out.  Commitment, things we once did, goals we want to achieve...as we age, we can watch these walls fall or stay sturdy within ourselves.  If only we could overcome them, reach that goal, surpass our old record,  rebuild what we once had.

    As I finished her book Until I Say Goodbye, author Susan Spencer-Wendel watched helplessly as ALS took her muscle control away, withering her limbs and hands and tongue until she could no longer walk, her talk a slur, her hands unable to type other than moving a thumb (she was an award-winning journalist).  As she watched others eating joyfully and drinking, swimming and laughing, she constantly focused not on what it was she could no longer do, but what she simply accepted.  Acceptance took away the pain.  Not defeat, she said, but acceptance.

   This was something out of her control.  But for Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, he has decided that walls are simply something we create.  “A man is the sum total of his actions," he told Bloomberg Businessweek.  "Even back through high school, when we first started to study this, I began to really believe it. This wasn’t ‘I think therefore I am,’ like the Cartesians. You’re accountable for what you do. You’re not accountable for what you thought. You’re not accountable for what you recommended. You’re accountable for what you actually got done.”
 
   The article goes on to provide what might be Ballmer's inspiration, the English diplomat Thomas Bodley wanting to improve the library near the end of the 16th century, saying,  “To put a library together that is deserving, you need a man with some time, some intelligence, a network, and some money.” As Ballmer says now: “He (Bodley) found his civic calling, and I was moved by that. I am 58 and I’ve got some time, some money, a network, and some intelligence. I just don’t know how to make a difference.”

   The walls fell at Berlin, and dams that block rivers are coming down bit by bit.  Other walls are mere pieces of their former selves (large sections of the Great Wall of China are completely gone, eroded away and under constant repair).  Occasionally, we find ourselves surprised to be peeking around someone's wall, or letting someone peek around ours. Living rooms have become "great" rooms as even the kitchen wall begins to disappear, allowing and even inviting people back in.  Perhaps time is working on us as well, ever so slowly opening the curtain of Oz to find that our walls were never there after all...allowing, maybe even inviting others in, even our own self.