Knowing Where You Come From

Last week, I found several old family photo albums at the farm.

Not photographs sitting somewhere in a cloud.
 

Actual albums.

Heavy pages.

Handwritten dates.

Names.

Weddings.

Children.

Homes.

Familiar faces at different ages.

People I loved and knew well.
 

And others I'd never met, but whose lives somehow formed part of the story that led to mine.

I sat there looking through them for far longer than I'd intended.
 

There's something incredibly intimate about holding an old photograph.

Seeing your parents and grandparents young.

Coming across faces from further back.

Realising that someone chose to take that photograph, had it developed and carefully placed it into an album.
 

And decades later, there you are, looking back at a moment they probably considered completely ordinary.

Then I found something that made me ridiculously happy.

Photographs of my Nana and my family in Rome.
 

I lived in Rome for many years, and somehow seeing my Nana there decades before me felt incredibly special.

The thought that she'd walked some of the same streets I later walked thousands of times.

That she'd stood in front of the Colosseum.

Looked out over the same city.

Experienced a place that would eventually become such an enormous part of my story.

She couldn't possibly have known that then.

And neither could I.
 

Life is strange like that.

We think we're forging entirely new paths, and then occasionally we discover little threads connecting us to something that came before.

It made me think about belonging.
 

I've spent much of my life living away from where I was born.

I've made homes in different countries.

I've loved places deeply.

Certain people have felt like home.
 

I've always thought of belonging as something we create.

But lately, I've been discovering another kind.

Something older.
 

A sense of knowing where you come from, even if you don't necessarily stay there.

And perhaps that's partly why these albums affected me so much.

They gave faces to the life that existed before mine.

They also made me realise something slightly strange.
 

We may be one of the most photographed generations in history... and yet I wonder how much we'll actually leave behind.
 

Thousands of photographs live on our phones.

Holidays.

Dinners.

Dogs.

Birthdays.

Sunsets.

Ordinary Tuesdays.

And most of them disappear into the strange digital abyss otherwise known as our camera roll.

How many do we print?

How many names do we write down?

How many stories do we preserve?

Will someone be able to sit at a table eighty years from now and discover us the way I was discovering them?

Suddenly, those albums felt incredibly precious.

And they made me wonder about something else.

What do we inherit from the people who came before us?

Not houses.

Money.

Possessions.
 

The things that are harder to see.
 

Temperaments.

Strengths.

Fears.

Longings.
 

Ways of loving.

Ways of coping.

A need for freedom.

A need for security.
 

Some of it is genetic.

Some of it is learned.

Some shaped by family and culture.

And some may simply be uniquely ours.
 

Maybe we don't need to know where every thread originated.

But perhaps it's worth occasionally asking ourselves:
 

What do I want to keep?

And what am I ready to put down?
 

I've been thinking about this particularly in relation to the women who came before me.

It's very easy to romanticise earlier generations when you're sitting at an old farm looking through beautiful black-and-white photographs.
 

But simpler didn't necessarily mean easier.

Many of the choices available to women today simply weren't available to the women who came before us.
 

There must have been women who were intelligent.

Creative.

Ambitious.

Adventurous.

Independent.

Unconventional.
 

Women who imagined lives different from the ones circumstances allowed them to live.

When I think about that, I realise how many freedoms I take for granted.
 

I can work.

Create.

Earn my own money.

Travel.

Live independently.

Change direction.

Start again.

Build a life that might look nothing like theirs.
 

Perhaps that's an extraordinary form of inheritance too.

Not merely inheriting what our ancestors had...

but inheriting possibilities they may never have had themselves.
 

Honouring where we come from doesn't mean recreating it.

Perhaps it means keeping the wisdom without keeping every limitation.

Carrying forward the strength without believing we must carry every burden.

Recognising patterns without deciding they are destiny.

We can love the people who came before us and still choose differently.

Sometimes doing something differently may be precisely how a family evolves.
 

And one day, strangely enough, we'll become the people who came before someone else.

Our ordinary lives will become somebody else's history.
 

The people we love.

The places we lived.

The journeys we took.

The choices we're making now.

The photographs we barely look at after taking them.
 

One day, those may be the fragments someone uses to understand where they came from.

Perhaps that's what has felt so grounding about this time for me.

For someone who has spent so much of her life moving through the world, I'm discovering what it feels like to have roots.
 

Not roots that trap you.

Roots that hold you.

Something that allows you to look backwards with love while still choosing where you go next.

And perhaps that's the paradox I'm beginning to understand.
 

We can wander very far from where we began and still carry something of where we came from with us.

Sometimes we might even unknowingly find ourselves walking the same streets.
 

And yes...
 

I think I'm going to start printing more photographs.

Because some things deserve to exist somewhere other than a phone.