Street – The Words

Today’s theme for the Developing an eye course is “Street” . It seems to me a perfect follow up to yesterday’s theme – home.

A street, according to Wikipedia, is a paved road. From the Latin “Via Strata”. This gives rise to visions of cobbled paths with people walking along in sandals and togas – a result of reading the adventures of Asterix & Obelix all through life!

While that memory makes me smile, it leaves me thinking about where all those streets of ancient Rome led to. Of for that matter, streets of Alexandria, Machu Pichu, Angkor Wat or Mohenjo Daro.

Man has spent generation after generation building cities – often on the ruins of earlier ones – homes, granaries, public baths, offices, arenas, palaces, – building civilization. And amidst all these run the streets – connecting one to the other. A “via” to connecting people. Connecting lives. We have paved these paths with gravel, cobblestones, tar, concrete.

We have invented the wheel, the cart, the limousine, to traverse these streets. The faster we moved along our streets the less we moved towards each other.

Perhaps it is time for us to begin paving our streets with recycled plastic. No matter how strange the concept and how expensive the process. It may teach us to reach into ourselves and recycle our mistakes. To create beauty from our own ugliness.

The “Einbahnstraße” – a road sign that fascinated me enormously as a child – is a one-way street. That is not a bad thing. Often these one-way streets make for smoother movement of traffic. As long as they inter-connect. As long as they lead us to destinations.

Our streets need to stop being paths to dead ends. For, often, at the end of a street can be a gate leading to new vistas. And we do not see that the end is really the beginning. If we fail to recognize this, we will park our vehicles across the street blocking traffic. Impeding us.