As I arrived home today, I was greeted by the news of the death of Mikhail Gorbachev. It takes me back...
For those who may not understand who this man is, or what he meant to my life, let me explain.
I grew up in a time where one half of the world was at war with the other half. Not always a shooting war, but sometimes. I lived through what is known as the Cold War. The nightly news was filled almost daily with headlines of where the United States and the Soviet Union clashed about something somewhere on the globe.
I was only few years old during the Cuban missile crisis. I lived with the fear of my brothers being drafted into the service to fight a war in a jungle, far, far away. Nuclear weapons were a nearly a nightly topic on the news. You learned things from newspapers and television news in those days. We faced 'mutual assured destruction' during my lifetime. It was a life of us verses them. Although I was never on the front lines of battle, it touched my life in nearly every facet, so much so I wrote a book titled 'The Bear' about a present day struggle between the U.S. and Russia in today's world. 'The Bear' was a moniker of the Soviet Union in those days.
Then, a funny thing happened. The two leaders of the most powerful nations in the world came together and drove the first nail in the coffin of the Cold War. Then another, and another. They began to talk. They began to possibly understand each other. Whatever it was, although the struggles of the USSR became known at a later date, Mr. Gorbachev began to turn the USSR in a different direction. A famous line from President Reagan is well known; "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall", and it wasn't long afterward, this happened and the world changed.
So, what does this mean to me? I'll tell you.
As I enter the last third of my life, I see little pieces of what I knew slip away. It's the death of a famous person, an athlete, a politician, family members. Each of us in our own way struggle to hang onto pieces of our past and as we age, we begin to lose those pieces and there is not much we can do about it. At least in the present, until we understand the past is a learning tool. We do not live in the past, we live in the present with an eye on the future. The past should be used to guide us forward into the only thing we have, tomorrow.
What we can bring with us into tomorrow is hope, hope that we have learned from history, from our own mistakes and embrace what is the unknown. A new piece of my past has now faded into the history books but with that, I embrace what once was and I hope to carry those lessons into the future to make it a better place for not only myself, but for others.
