Malta

I sit on my balcony, looking across the Mediterranean and considering this island. This is my first visit to this part of the world and I am struck by how very different this is than my home in America. And yet…there is much here that is very familiar to me…people are people after all and it seems that we are not so far apart. The differences that seem so dramatic at first are actually superficial and transient. I see people for whom this unique and beautiful island is as mundane a part of their day as Pennsylvania has become for me. I am sure that they would find my life just as exotic as I find it here.

I sat last night in a café in Valetta and watched the people that were out shopping and socializing. The city was decorated for Christmas and the activity was all too familiar to me. It was the same families shopping together and the same crowd of young people out to meet and impress each other. It occurred to me that these similarities must cross not only the boundaries of culture, but surely the boundaries of time as well. We look at the distant past and attribute some mystical quality to the lives that were led in those ancient times. Isn’t it more likely that their lives were very much like our own…that they raged against the same injustices and shared in the same joys?

I had believed, when I was younger, that modern humanity had reached some exalted state…that we had advanced intellectually and morally over those that came before us…that society moved ever forward, improving the lives of all of us. Now I wonder…

The small things that I can see over my brief lifetime have not improved. We do not treat each other as well as we once did. There is not the same respect and compassion in the world that I saw a mere 20 years ago. Every culture is subject to its own set of lies. I see that the people of this island believe their lies as strongly as we believe our lies back in America. They tell us how lucky we are to live in this age and how brutal and squalid life was in ancient times…I wonder.

Could this not be another of the lies that we are told…and that we accept without question? Yes, the ancients had to contend with diseases and hardships that we will never know, but they had community and family that have been lost to us. We live long lives, but lives of loneliness and desperation. Only in our youth are we given the support and comfort that I think was a common part of life in the past. When we become adults, we find ourselves chasing things that don’t fulfill us and our lives are filled with a stress that we face alone. I sometimes think a short life of 35-40 years, surrounded and supported by a close family and friends might be better than a long life of 80-100 years. I especially feel this way when I think of how many people spend the last 20 years of their lives shut in a nursing home and cut off from so much of what makes life worth living.

There are many beautiful places here…many things to see and do, but there is a sadness here as well. I find as I get older that the sadness grows and fills so many of the empty spaces of this life. It has become like some background noise that is always there. Not sure that I wouldn’t risk disease and early death for a chance to feel that community…of course I could just be lying to myself ;-{)}.

Norm