If you could go back and witness any historical event, which one would you pick?
If I could go back and witness any moment in history, I initially thought I should choose something suitably Important. A presidential inauguration. A great military victory. The signing of some document that changed the world.
Then I realized, absolutely not.
I don’t want to witness an assassination. I don’t want to watch people die. And honestly, I don’t need to stand around while a bunch of men sign a document.
I think I’d go to November 9, 1989, the night the Berlin Wall came down.
Not because I particularly want to watch a wall being demolished. I want to watch the people.
I want to see the moment when something that had seemed permanent suddenly wasn’t. The confusion. The disbelief. The laughter. The tears. Strangers hugging. People climbing onto the wall. People chipping away pieces of it to take home. People realizing, perhaps for the first time, that history isn’t actually inevitable.
Because that’s what fascinates me about history. The psychological moment before people understand that everything has changed.
Imagine standing there and knowing that tomorrow’s world is going to be different from yesterday’s but nobody quite knows what that world will look like yet.
I think I’d want to be in the crowd, listening to people talk, watching their faces, wondering what they were thinking.
And probably thinking the most psychologically interesting thought of all:
Holy wow. The world just changed.
And then I’d probably want a piece of the wall.
Categories: Culture, identity, mental health, politics, Psychology, society
psychologistmimi 
The week of November 5, 1989 was when I somehow caught a virus (at a Physics meeting!), and ended up with ME/CFS forever. I had just turned 40.
One of the last things I did at the Princeton U. Plasma Physics lab was to go for a walk with a young German woman who was an intern/grad student at the Lab, and who was dropping her stay with us – to go home and be present in her own country because the Berlin Wall had come down, and she didn’t want to miss it.
My life had changed – I never worked again, and hers had changed by her choice to be part of a historic transition. I hope it was everything she wanted it to be.
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“If you could go back and witness any historical event, which one would you pick?”
Hehe Probably one of the ones i’ve been doing anonymously Now However again
i Digress Dear Miriam
How Wonderful it is
When Walls Restricting
Human Freedoms Fall in All
The Ways that comes and goes
Or Perhaps the Waves in a Pond
Finally Dissipate into an Entire
Calmer Ocean
of Humanity
As the Orange
Pebble that Made
The Waves finally
Sinks to the Bottom Resting in Peace
Change Remains New Troughs and
Waves
Walls And
Freedoms
Do Come and Go
Now With SMiLes of
Existence As Is Yes Change
Both Gift and
Curse and
Mostly the
In-betweens
Sigh as Some Folks
Are Still ‘Waiting for Godot’
for
orderly
absurd clarity..:)
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