Travel in Life

Skipping the Bridge

Something interesting happened while I was writing about a musician.

He posted that he had found an old cassette tape. It contained an interview recorded the day after he completed an 84-hour DJ set more than twenty years ago. To him, the tape was precious because it had belonged to his grandmother, who had kept it all those years.

That was his story.

When I shared it, I realized I was doing something different.

Before asking anyone else to care about the tape, I first rebuilt the world around it.

Who was he?

Why was an 84-hour set unusual?

Was it really a record?

What happened afterward?

Only after those questions had been answered did the cassette become interesting.

The tape itself hadn’t changed.

Its provenance had.

Actually, perhaps provenance isn’t quite the right word.

I wasn’t only establishing where the tape came from. I was rebuilding the context that made the tape worth finding.

Without that context, it is simply an old cassette.

With it, the cassette becomes an artifact from a remarkable event.

I realized this is something we skip surprisingly often.

We present conclusions before rebuilding the world that made those conclusions meaningful.

Museums don’t do that.

An archaeologist doesn’t hold up a broken piece of pottery and say, “Isn’t this fascinating?”

First comes the excavation.

Where was it found?

How old is it?

Who made it?

What else was found nearby?

Only then does the fragment become history.

The same thing happens in ordinary conversation.

Someone says, “I found this.”

The mind quietly asks,

“Why should I care?”

Sometimes the answer is emotional.

Sometimes historical.

Sometimes scientific.

But there is almost always a missing bridge between the object and its importance.

That bridge is what I found myself building.

The cassette was never the whole story.

It was evidence from within a larger one.

Perhaps that is what good explanation often does.

It doesn’t make the object more important.

It rebuilds the world in which the object already mattered.

WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.