When the World Tilts

In a season of change, what remains?

As I navigate this season of change in my life, I’ve been contemplating moments when my world tilted. One of those moments—one that barely registered at the time—came in the early 1990s.

In one of my early-morning German classes, the professor came bouncing in, giddy and breathless about this new thing called Netscape. We could use it to get a train schedule in Germany right now. She bubbled over with excitement about how it was going to change everything. The moment stands out in my memory, but not my reaction to it. I don’t think I really understood it—I don’t think many of us did. It was 8:30 in the morning. We were groggy and foggy, still waking up, trying to rev up our brains to think and speak in a different language.

It did change everything.

If you’re my generation or older, I bet you can pinpoint when your world changed from analog to digital. It happened in the transition from college to the workforce for me. In high school, we had some computers that were used for coding. I knew my brain wasn’t wired for that, so I never considered those classes. I didn’t take typing either and opted for art instead. What can I say? I knew myself even then. To this day, coworkers hear me banging away on my keyboard and are always shocked if they see I’m only using four fingers. I’m that fast—terrible, but fast.

I went to college with a word processor. It was like an electric typewriter with a built-in screen just above the keyboard. It had discs and printed where paper would normally come out of a typewriter. As an English major, with a million papers to write every semester, I loved it. There were computers around campus, but hardly anyone had their own. I knew one girl who did, and she’d built it with her father. I had no idea what that meant, to build a computer.

Email came to campus during my college years, but only for the campus community. We could go to a computer lab and email our professors or friends at school, but not home, not friends off campus. Which didn’t matter, because it was doubtful anyone at home had a computer, let alone email.

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

That Netscape morning came just a few years after another world-tilting moment: the fall of the Berlin Wall. The reunification of East and West Germany was underway and was the topic of our German classes. This professor was interested in the question “Was bleibt?/What remains?”, which was particular to East Germany’s transition. It considered the legacy of East Germany’s communist government and its history as the reunified society forged its future.

Part of that legacy had to do with the Stasi—the powerful and terrifying secret police—and the surveillance tactics used against its own people. The Stasi used a network of ordinary citizens who reported on their own neighbors, friends, and family members. When the wall came down, the Stasi tried to destroy its records. They didn’t want people to know who had informed on whom—many people didn’t want that. Imagine finding out that your neighbor—or worse, your friend or family member—reported you to the Stasi, maybe for something you didn’t even say or do.

What remains, indeed.

And this question—what remains?—applies not only to shifting societies, but to individuals. It has followed me through every transition, every reinvention, including the one I’m in now.

On a trip to Amsterdam, we visited the Museum of the Dutch Resistance. It’s the museum to visit after the Anne Frank House. After learning what happened to the Frank family, the Van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer, learning the stories of the Dutch Resistance reinflates the spirit a bit.

At a certain point during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, the Dutch figured out the importance of personal information. They knew once the Germans had it, they had everything. They had your life. The Resistance told their citizens: Don’t give away your information. People knew they could end up in a prison camp as a result. But prison camps could be escaped. Once the Nazis had your personal information, you were permanently ensnared.

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After I graduated college, my life quickly became networked. At my first job at a small daily newspaper, I worked at my first computer and literally watched a newspaper go from being hand set with Exacto knives and wax to computer design and pagination. My second job had email and…wait for it…a website. Not because businesses and organizations had any idea what websites were or how to use them, but because they all felt like they should just have one.

I started my career in print, writing and editing print collateral. With the dawn of digital and its every evolution—websites, e-readers, social media, virtual reality—the prediction has always been the death of print. Or the death of something. Younger generations are always telling me that email is dead. I haven’t even seen it catch a cold yet. And print has not died. Nothing has died. Everything has become more complex, providing more ways to reach people. Every new innovation adds another channel to the mix that we have to figure out how to use, who it reaches best, what content to put on it, and so on.

More ways to collect our information, too. Sometimes we know we’re giving it, and sometimes we don’t. The lessons of the Dutch Resistance—don’t give away your information—still echoes in my head.

Every transition asks the question, what are we willing to reveal about ourselves, what are we willing to give up, and what do we guard fiercely.

I can’t write this from my home in the United States without thinking about the world-tilting events unfolding around us and how they will continue to reverberate far into the future. I can’t write this without thinking about how we seem to be hardwired in our DNA to forget the lessons of history, to forget every lesson of oppression, the powers that be somehow believing it’s all going to turn out differently for them this time. And I wonder what will remain for the rest of us when the world tilts back—because it will, history has shown that it will. What will remain for those of us who tried to do something—anything—and those who stood by?

There’s no turning back time. As many times as I threaten to throw our television out the window and banish the computer from the house, I can’t go back to pre-Internet days. I’m not sure I’d want to. Progress, even if we don’t like all of it, if we’re not always adept at managing it—if we’re blatantly irresponsible about it—is still, well, progress.

The arrival of the Internet was not the only or most significant world-tilting moment of my life. There have been others:

• The day this guy came sauntering into the conference room on the first day of my college summer job and I thought, “Who does he think he is?” My future husband of thirty years and counting, that’s who.

• The day our son entered the world. I never thought I would know so much about dinosaurs or know so acutely what it means to have my heart travel outside my body.

• The day my mother had her first stroke, and her second stroke.

• The day she died. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her, hear her words of encouragement in my head, smile or laugh at a memory of her, miss her.

Each one carried lessons about who I am and what I carry forward, preparing me for this latest moment: an unexpected career transition. Now that the emotional roller coaster has settled, I’m able to look at what remains from those 17 years, what serves me—the great experience and skills I gained and perhaps most importantly, the community that continues to surround and support me, the way we’re supporting each other.

My writing remains, provides structure to my day, purpose and fulfillment.

Reading remains, feeding my imagination, my mind, heart and soul.

Making with my hands remains, filling my well of creativity, freeing my mind to wander as my hands work the knitting needles, crochet hook, sewing machine.

Possibility remains, as I look to my future and what it could hold, consider what I have to contribute to another organization and to other writers. I’m excited to see how it’s all going to unfold.

Here’s to what remains and to the new and undiscovered parts of ourselves yet to emerge—the parts of ourselves we’re just now ready to meet.

Judy