Walking on my ancestors

On a recent walk, I found myself in a churchyard. I’ve been here dozens of times before.

Because it commands wonderful views of the coastline, I’m usually looking up and out across the sea.

Today though, it was cloudy and I found myself looking at my surroundings more, looking at the ground more.

For the first time in this place I noticed that the path is made up of unusually large stone slabs. They’re all slightly different to one another, some are taller, others taper in unexpected ways.

Upon further inspection, I noticed that some of them had marks on them. Some of them had writing carved into them. Reading the text, it dawned upon me that these are gravestone. I’m walking on the gravestone of someone.

At some point in the distant past the churchyard must have been larger. Many hundreds of years ago, as the town grew and land was of a premium, older graves were moved and their stone markers reused as a path around the church.

I found this realisation at once interesting and slightly alarming. I had strong sense of the past and the weight of history in this specific location. Centuries of people buried here. Stones placed to memorialise the occupier. I’m sure that, at the time, the families and loved ones imagined that these gravestones would be there forever, a permanent, upright, reminder for all generations to come.

But history shows that nothing is immutable. At some point change occurs. It could be natural, or decisions made by humans, but nothing lasts forever. Nothing.

It was wonderful to make this realisation and it made me think about my own life. How the things that I think and hold dear will not remain. As I’m writing this, it sounds sad and melancholy, but this is not how I received this thought. Rather, it was much more joyous than that. New things happen all the time. There’s new things to be discovered, investigated and interacted with. Each generation has their turn, and then it gets passed over to the next.

I love thinking about the past, but, it turns out, I love anticipating the future just as much.