Deutschland - Ersten Tag

Thoughts on the plane...

This morning we were all up bright and early: the Huses off to work and school, Brittan to spend another day exploring Oslo before flying back to Madrid, and Cara & I taking the train to Jernbanetorget (the central Oslo station) to catch the express train to Gardermoen (Oslo's airport). Our flight to München was a bit delayed so Cara had the chance to wander around getting pokéstops. Having acquired her cold from the beginning of the week I just sat there waiting and introspecting.

There is something about being here and seeing all these things that makes reality a bit more real. Norway is a real place where they speak Norwegian. Vaagsland (Wogsland) Gaard is a real place, where distant cousins still still live. There is a house there Ole lived in with his family before leaving for America. People here grow old, infirm, and eventually die just like we do. Society outlives the individual. This truth is driven home visiting buildings that have stood for centuries. My children are the 6th generation of Wogslands born in America and the old farmhouse still stands on Vaagsland Gaard. The monument to my older ancestor Hallvard Graatop commemmorates his rebellion in 1438 dozens of generations before that.

The icy hand of Death feels ever closer on my shoulder contemplating time on this scale in a way that the geologic timescale for some reason never has. Our time here is so short and so much of it is frittered away on meaningless pursuits: acquiring things and consuming resources rather than building for the future and enjoying life. In Norway many, many people have apple trees. They are a fairly common sight even though they take 20 years to mature. Some individual planted each one of them and nutured it through the years with no reward, knowing that someday it would bear fruit and people would enjoy that fruit likely long after that individual was gone.

The people of Telemark are know as being rebellious and going their own way. Friends back home have joked that my tagline should be "rebelling since 1438". Indeed, I do have a strong libertarian streak. But I also see the other side of myself here - the builder, the one who wants to leave the world a better place than I entered it. Somehow I lost that drive in the rat race. I stopped searching for for knowledge prefessionally and switched to join the workforce, advancing my career from job to job by learning to provide greater value to employers. Cara decided we weren't having any more children after Zara. We left our house, our land we owned in Knoxville and became vagabonds moving from place to place. Where is home? I do not know how to answer that question.