Bullet holes
A cemetery in Berlin, and the half-second that decides everything.
I walked into an old cemetery today, in the middle of Berlin.
No reason. I just walked in.
Old headstones. Family graves. Small mausoleums, and large ones. Big trees, a lot of green. Not perfectly kept — and better for it.
Then I saw a family grave.
Nothing remarkable at first.
Until I came closer.
Bullet holes. Dozens of them. In a few square metres of stone.
At first I thought: this can’t be real.
I put my hand on the wall.
And then I felt it.
Real impacts. Some shallow. Some deep. The marks of a war that happened here decades ago, and that is, apparently, still in the stone.
You come across this in Berlin.
That split second.
The moment between what happens and what you do with it.
The fraction of a second where you normally react on automatic. From your history. Your beliefs. Expectations. Programming.
Making that half-second larger.
That’s where the work is.
That’s where the room appears to actually look.
Not at what you should be.
Not at what others expect of you.
Not at the metric you’ve started measuring yourself by.
But at the question: who am I?
Because when you truly know who you are, you also know what’s yours to do.
You no longer have to choose from everything the world puts in front of you.
You recognise what is yours. And you recognise what is not.
That last part is often the hardest.
Because then you have to let go. Beliefs. Expectations. Roles. Sometimes an image of yourself you thought was your identity.
But the better you know who you are, the less there is to let go of.
You simply no longer need it.
Not because those things are bad.
But because you see they are not the answer.
You walk into an old cemetery one day.
You put your hand on a wall.
And suddenly you understand something again.
Not because someone told you.
But because, for a moment, you saw it yourself.
Not collecting more answers.
Making larger the room where you can hear the answer yourself.
The room where you can meet yourself.
Who am I?
Because when you truly know that,
you also know what’s yours to do.
- Ron