Grappling with the End of Mohamed Salah, Liverpool’s Constant

The world turns, the sun rises and sets, time passes. Nothing is a constant, not ever. The borders of the country you will live your life in bear little resemblance to the ones your great-grandparents lived through and they will not be the ones your great-grandchildren experience.

For many, the timelines of change where they were born will be shorter. Open up a map from the year you were born and look for what has been altered while you were busy looking elsewhere. Did Germany and all of Eastern Europe have a line through it?

Did Rhodesia or North Yemen exist? Had Spain departed Western Sahara, leaving Mauritania and Morocco to decide the fates of the people who lived there? What of the lines demarcating the Balkans or Kashmir or the island of New Guinea?

The technologies you rely on, the foods that you eat, the language that you use. From within the lived human experience, all of these can feel deceptively constant, the incremental nature of so much of change allowing many of us to feel as though we exist within set, safe, stable lives. Even if we really don’t.