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Week 68: Ripples Across the Centuries

I keep apologizing for gaps in writing. And I finally realized that the thing I was avoiding was the thing I needed the most.

The obstacle is the way.

Writing is highly meditative for me, much like running. It give me the chance to ruminate and clarify my thoughts. It’s also cathartic in a way I never expected when I first joined a 30-day writing challenge during Covid.

In the time since the last post, my wife and I celebrated our 12^th wedding anniversary in London, the kids finished the school year, and I got tapped to set up an AI task force at work.

The trip to London was amazing. My wife and I did all the things, and as an added bonus my cousins who live in Switzerland popped over to hang with us. We got high tea, we saw a show on the West End, we did a double-decker bus tour, we saw Romeo & Juliet in the Globe Theater, we went to the Tate Museums, the British Museum and the Tower of London.

And we got traditional Sunday roast in the Mayflower tavern, the place where the actual ship embarked from in September 1620.

Funny enough, years ago my Uncle did some genealogy research and found that our family had direct lineal descent to a passenger on the Mayflower, John Howland. There is a famous story that John was swept overboard during a storm but somehow caught a line dragging in the water and was pulled back aboard the ship.

As my cousin and I sat there, he commented on how if that guy doesn’t get lucky and catch that rope, we wouldn’t be sitting there.

All at once, the realization of the ripple effect of that fortunate turn of events hit me. I was amazed at how something that happened centuries in the past could one day result in John Howland’s distant descendants having Sunday brunch at the same spot they’d left England from 400 years ago.

Talk about coming full circle.

At the end of the weekend, I made that sad return trip home. Riding in the uber on the way back to Heathrow airport, I had time to take stock. It occurred to me I’d just taken a weekend trip to London with my wife and had an absolutely smashing good time.

In that moment I felt so grateful for all of it.

And it made me think of ripple effects. One person does or doesn’t catch hold of a rope and countless people are never born. A couple small decisions you make leads you to a running club where you say hello to a pretty girl in an Ohio State sweater and the next thing you know, you have two kids and live in Ohio. One decision to quit drinking and save myself certainly improved my own life and the lives of my immediate family, but what about their children, and their children’s children?

Ripple effects.

What ripples are you causing in your own life?

Are they the kind that will propagate down through the centuries and improve the lives of our descendants?

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” Pericles, William Shakespeare

Live triumphantly. See you next week.