Thoughts on where in time we are

How does a time come to an end?
Do we really just wake up one morning and autumn has left its scent everywhere when yesterday it had been summer, just as Tucholsky once wrote?
Or have there been signs we tend to ignore?
The early sunsets and colder nights?
Rain clouding the horizon over the fields –
Until one tragic day the light summer dress and the white shoes cannot withstand the hailstorm and leave us shivering helplessly in the middle of the street?

Don’t get me wrong here! I have always loved autumn the most. After 2 years of plague and a war next door, I find my life not in a place to enjoy all its coziness and trap into its darkness, I fear. But that is a problem for an own blog post.

Facebook was so friendly to suggest the austrian Comedian Lisa Eckert into my feed, and her jokes about having slept through a change of times being declared in Germany over the Ukraine war, and her relentless jokes on not being able to wake up in a new time and maybe prefering to suffocate under a pillow once again surprised me with how much disgust I can feel for another human.

How heartless can this ice cold woman be?, I wonder as I remember a train ride to an early shift at work months ago, and my lack of motivation to leave the house before 7 – and how it turned into gratefulness, because this way I was able to witness February the 24th right from the start and did not sleep into the day that attacked, deeply injured and deformed the version of central and eastern Europe I had been used to and that I had loved.

Violin music reminds me of how time flies by, and of how it runs into oblivion like a river in the rain when trying to keep the bright moments while raindrops are already drowning them.
…of course I chose a musical instrument that cuts into hearts like a knife.

When I decided to write in early modern Europe, I realized that some would still count it as a medieval story. With witchcraft, inquisition, plague and wars. But for me, those are not medieval things and medieval times had not that much darkness! I had read Jostein Gaarders “Sophie’s world” and had memorized the end of the middle ages as Europe turning 15! The end of protection and safety behind the city walls and in castles, to protect everyone from babaric strangers! The end of monesteries intellectual guidance, which preserved many antique texts for us today!
Actually, my chosen century, the 17th one, was the one that once and for all changed the ways cities and castles were built, because modern warfare made high walls redundant. Canons won over them as well. Goodbye castles!
Goodbye childhood! Goodbye safety and protection! Goodbye city walls!
And hello crsisi. Crisis of identity, of nationality, of finding meaning?
Is that what awaits us after turning 15?
Maybe.

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If all this was to leave little signs at the horizon, would we even want to spot them?
“You would”, my witch hisses over my shoulder into a pumpkin spice latte I try not to feel lonely about, and she is right.

I am thin skinned. I remember what I did on February the 24th in 2022 forever.
I have been listing things the pandemic took out of my life.
I have been working with refugees all my adult life so far.
I developed concepts to teach my primary school students the green house effect.

I think it is important to know where in time we are and where in history we are.
Even if it hurts, because our walls have burned down and we have to give up protection for a bloody crisis in meaning.