Societies

You know, humans don't think they just get there out of nowhere all the time,

they feel like they come from last week,

and yesterday,

and a few minutes ago,

and oops just missed it.

The pen writes their lives out through time,

the past, the present and the future,

the what was, the what is, and the what will be.

And they sit in the middle of their time,

and their past they can remember but their futures they can only imagine.

So they look to the past to see what they can learn that will help them in the future.

In that way, humans learn who they are inside themselves,

and they get to understand the world around them.

And inside their heads they make memories of how to find their way around,

maps of their lives.

They look up at the sky above them and down at the earth beneath their feet,

and try to make those maps that make sense of it all.

And it's not as if it's just them and the streets beneath their feet and the stars above their heads to make sense of,

there's a whole lot of other people around them of all different shapes and sizes to deal with.

They have to get to know what they think about things,

and understand who they are by recognising the things that they share

and the things that they disagree about.

That is the environment on the pages of which their lives are written.

But that world in which they live isn't separate from them.

They change it as it changes them.

Their lives are made up of what comes and goes

between them and the world around them.

How they live their lives changes the lives that they live.

And from the moment they are born they start to learn that there are some things they can do on their own,

but there are even more things that they can only do when they are working together with other people.

And those people around them, with whom they interact and share their lives are their community,

the people with whom they share their understandings, their laws and their way of life.

Remembering how we got here,

and tales from different times

Maps for understanding ourselves

and the world around us

Living and working and playing together