Look Both Ways

Approach the crosswalk.  Left, right, left.  No wait.  Right, left, right. No wait.  Its a one-way street! I think?  Welcome to London, a labrynth of majestic buildings towering over narrow streets that intersect at odd angles.  Sometimes one-way streets even have a median in the center, only both sides of the median have cars travelling in the same direction.  They were put there purposefully by parliament to confuse pedestrians.

However, it appears as though the British government has taken some pity on ignorant tourists (like myself) and therefore painted either "look left" or "look right" on the brink of the major crosswalks, to keep us civilians from falling victim to the wild taxi drivers who don't seem to understand red lights.  However, in the event of a random blank crosswalk, my small family of Americans gets lost in the crowd of j-walkers and cars that just don't want to stop.  And at 10:00 at night with one contact missing (my brother's fault!), the middle of a street looking the wrong direction was not exactly the place I wanted to be.  After a close call with a red-light runner that ended with me diving off the street and straight into a curb, I think in the future I will just take the tube.

Despite my near-death experience with crazy London drivers, the remainder of the exursion was truly an adventure.  We spend hours upon hours in the British Musem, where we saw the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of mystical spells and drawings depicting ancient Egyptian procedures for ensuring a pleasant afterlife.  We also experienced ancient Rome, Greece, Mesopotamia, Nubia, Midieval Europe, and a whole array of different cultures, their entire existance preserved in their tools, art, and writings.  It is truly amazing that the fragil papyrus drawings of the Egyptians have survived all this time.

Painting a picture in my mind of these ancient civilizations, people just like us lived and walked, made art and made war, ate crude meals while moving from place to place, and sat down for huge festivals with exotic items imported via camel from the far reaches of the world they knew.  The sun was once controlled by gods, and life and death were merely temporary states.  Once, a soul could be saved by a certain type of Grecian urn.  The existance of the gods was indesputable and magic existed in the cycles of the sun and the stars, the harvest of crops, the gift of life, and the mystery of death. 

So what is our magic, the sparkle that lives in our society, that will someday be looked upon with awe and wonder?  Will future civilizations decode our writing and find beauty, or will they just find a shopping list?  Will they see our scientific theories as blind faith, or the stepping stones to the future?  Is the world we know 'flat' compared to that of future civilizations? Perhaps someday, a piece of your life will be on display in a museum somewhere, and people will marvel over the complexity of our civilization. Or perhaps, a piece of crude graffiti will survive, and people will turn up their noses at our uncivilized vulgarity. Or maybe both will survive, and future anthropologists will know us better than we know ourselves.

So take a moment, as you cross the streets of time, and look both ways.  Look backward, and learn all you can about the people who once walked this earth, paving the way for our innovations, and look ahead to the discoveries that can be made in our lifetimes, and in the wider future.  Look left right, then look right left.  As soon as I figure out this left-side-of-the-road stuff, the street will be safe to cross, and then I will truly be on the 'other side of the pond,' or perhaps even the other side of time.