Hi Reader -
The New York Times shared a reel describing ships emerging from the Danube River in Serbia, and the caption disturbed my spirit.
Extreme heat has lowered the river enough to expose ships that have been submerged there since World War II.
The heat didn't put them there.
It just lowered the water enough for people to see what had been there all along.
Sometimes heat gets blamed for things it didn't cause.
Because there are all kinds of heat.
A hard conversation.
A change in a relationship.
A new person asking questions.
Money getting tight.
Something growing faster than we expected.
A loss.
A deadline.
A moment when something we had gotten pretty good at living with becomes impossible to ignore.
All the things. . .
Maybe the heat caused the problem.
But maybe it didn't.
Maybe the water receded.
Maybe what we're seeing now has been there for a while.
And maybe we have questions about the water level.
What has caused the heat to rise enough for the water to recede?
What can we see now that we couldn't see before?
What responsibility do we have for what has been revealed, even if we didn't put it there?
The heat deserves our attention.
So does the wreckage.
One doesn't explain away the other.
The thought carried me both up and downstream.
Because those ships aren't just becoming visible.
They're in the way.
And some of them still contain explosives.
Well, shyt.
There's a lot more under this water.
I expanded the thought over on Substack.
The Water Receded →
