"I Was Here"

Yesterday morning, I took public transit to work. It's incredibly convenient - I catch the bus right in front of my house, take it to the City Library, walk across the library plaza to the train platform, and take the train to the University. Seamless, easy, and very pleasant. I should commute this way more frequently.

Anyway, I was walking on the plaza, on a cleaned path between banks of old, dessicated snow, when I came across something special. On a part of the plaza that hadn't been cleared of snow, someone carefully drawn the words "I was here" by removing the snow and revealing the bricks underneath. In the sun, the snow had melted and refroze as ice inside each of the letters. It had been there at least a day. It was one of those moments that called for a camera.

Of course, after three cups of coffee, my mind was afire that morning, and the snow grafitti set me on quite the tangent. Who was this great "I was"? What compelled him or her to write the phrase in the snow? Was he or she alone? Was this a one-off, or does this person leave messages like this in other places?

And then the irony dawned on me: There I was, alone, standing in this large public plaza at the heart of a city of over a million people, surrounded by monumental public architecture, skyscrapers, a Burger King, billboards, electronic signs, sculptures, fountains, gardens, rumbling light rail trains, automobiles, and buses, thinking "huh...how funny it is that this person felt like telling the world she was here."

If humans have an ecological role, it is to alter form. We leave a place changed from what it was when we arrived. We tell each other, our posterity, and nature herself that we were here. Some of our greatest human achievements are celebrated for their immutability. The drive for immortality - through fame or some other legacy - is a drive to have someone in the future remark that we were here. So maybe we want to leave our mark because we fight constantly against the fragility and capriciousness of human life. Individuals do this, and so do societies, writ large. One of the most enduring symbols of our modern achievements are an American flag and some bootprints on the moon, after all. "We were here." The artist, whatever his or her motives, left the most elegant statement of that fact of our human nature, in the form of three very short words drawn in the snow. It doesn't take much to make the statement.

This isn't entirely a bad trait. It's what's given us our great books, our beautiful cities, our timeless art and music, and our stunning advances. But for good or bad, it's worth recognizing that by our nature, we change the world around us, and that's something we cannot escape. Change is evidence that we were here, and clearly so many of us have the desire to leave evidence of our presence. Maybe if we're more cognizant of it, we'd be more careful of the changes we do make. Maybe the question is not always "what do we need to do to mitigate or to prevent change?" but rather is "how do we change for the better?"