I recently started helping out at school. Right now, I’m just helping my son’s teacher with spending some extra time doing math literacy and art lessons with the kiddos. It occurred to me, as I sat waiting for a kiddo get a classmate to come work some triple digit addition and subtraction with me, that kids leave their marks everywhere. Not just in their socks in the hallway or their toothpaste in the sink. Every elementary and middle school has desk graffiti. Made with pen, or heaven forbid, carved after hours of boring lectures. High school bathroom doors have not just witty comments about who did what with whom or who is whose best friend. While some may be a cry for help, they are, marks of existence. There are signs of humans wanting to BE everywhere. People want to make a mark on the world.
It got me thinking about how we, as human, have always wanted to make our presence known. As far back as cave paintings. The oldest cave paintings are known to have been from over 40,000 years ago from the Upper Paleolithic Era found in western India and Indonesia. The designs range from simple geometric shapes to more figurative designs of animals. But why, when worried about survival, did humans stop and make these cave paintings? To pass the time? To tell a story? To communicate with the next band of people to come by? To make simply make a mark to say I AM HERE!?
I got a chance to see petroglyphs, ancient carvings into rock, on the coast of the Kodiak Archipelago almost twenty years ago. Alutiiq ancestors made this rock art by pecking or using a small rock to chip flecks of stone away from a larger stone. Some of these petroglyphs are only accessible via boat now, as the sea level has risen from where it was 1,000 years ago. ( Petroglyphs (alutiiqmuseum.org)) It is hard to describe the sense of the past you feel when you are in the presence of something created that long ago. I haven’t been able to see cave art or drawings from further ago than that, but I know I would be blown away.
For centuries, and for whatever reason, humans have been making their mark on the world. And as I look at the next generations of kids who are struggling to do the same, in very different ways (youtube, other social media), I wonder what kind of mark will be left from them. I also wonder what kind of mark I have left on the world. I hope it is my kids. I hope that I have taught them to be themselves, to stand up for wrongs, to have integrity against all challenges, to be loyal to friends and family, to be happy.
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