Today, I turn 34. I think getting older is always amusing when you compare your current age to your childhood thoughts concerning it. For example, when I was young, I couldn’t even comprehend the age 34 because it seemed so old. And the people on Thirtysomething? Wow… they were arguing about affairs and layoffs and childcare, which seemed unthinkable when all I wanted to do was run around like a feral child playing hide-and-seek in my neighbor’s front yard, an acre of forest. On a hill, no less. We had our own world of fake leaf money and dead trees to take refuge in and branches to swing on where time seemed to stop, especially the land of adults and bills and jobs.

Now, solidly in adulthood we try and navigate our ways outside our wilds of childhood, amazed and delighted when we find rare moments of those past days where our very present seemed so impossible to imagine. Those were the days when we could count our friends on one hand, two if we were lucky. The world was still made up of individuals not a seething mass of humanity and all its permutations. Well, despite appearances, the world is still made up of individuals. One + one + one + one = revolution. The news presents culture en masse with news blips and panoramic photos and photos of unknown people on the street, and we are not worth 2 seconds of soundbites or a camera span or an anonymous photo.

We are individuals. And in joining together we connect and form a revolution made up of individuals, not unknown people. Instead of one large knot we are like George Seurat’s adventures in pointilism each providing a vital part of the whole. With that in mind, the link below takes you to an incredible interactive map of the dead and detained from events surrounding the Iranian election. And by no means is it a comprehensive list. I think breaking down the anonymity helps to remind us that no matter what the news may so often tells us, we do not go unnoticed.

Breaking the masses down into individual faces and names makes us face the individual parts, made up of individual friends and relatives and co-workers. When so often faced with the nameless, it’s hard to see yourself in the person on the street in Tehran or fighting against a Chinese police officer or any of the countless places news stories take us. In the giganticness of it all, it can be hard to make sense of everything, how we grow from children of our neighborhoods to adults of the world. Yesterday I came across a quote from Arundhati Roy from The Cost of Living that perfectly explains the joys and tragedies and truths of living life:

“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead. […] To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”— Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

Perfect. Just perfect.