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The Heritage Day Journey Recognising Where We Come From and The Journey That Brought Us Here
WORDS William Dodd
This past Thursday we celebrated ‘Heritage Day’ in South Africa by hiking Cape Town’s famous Table Mountain. Heritage Day is a public holiday meant to bring people together, across all spectrums, to celebrate our differences, and at the same time faithfully recognise that we’re all in this together. The idea behind all of this is to remember where you come from, what makes you unique and celebrate what brought you to where you are now – South Africa.
We chose to hike the four-hour trail up to the top of Table Mountain. Looking up from the bottom, this world wonder doesn’t seem to tower above the clouds; but from the top, the view certainly changes. Climbing this mountain got me thinking about our journey to the top. Usually, when you hike, it’s common to spend more time getting to where you’re going than you ever actually spend where you finally arrive.
As we look back upon the journeys that brought us here, and take time to focus on the heritage of one another, we may begin to realise that we’re all in this together.
Photo: William Dodd
Doesn’t that then make the journey more important than the arrival? Does the sheer amount of time spent on the journey make it more meaningful, more altering and more powerful than the destination itself? I thought about this as we were climbing this gorgeous centrepiece of Cape Town’s scenery. Knowing we clearly wouldn’t spend four hours on the top made me consider the importance of the journey – and all the little journeys in life we take to get to the destinations we hope for. There are the journeys of the day to day, the journeys of years, schools, professions, dreams, and finally the journey we take when our time on earth comes to an end.
Heritage Day is a celebration of the journey we all take to get where we are – celebrating not the destination, but the journey of histories, heritages, and pasts that have paved the way to where we are now.
Heritage Day is a celebration of the journey we all take to get where we are – celebrating not the destination, but the journey of histories, heritages, and pasts that have paved the way to where we are now. How beautiful it is to our human experience to take one day out of the year to focus not on the present, nor where we are going, but where we come from, and what brought us to where we are.
South Africa is a complex nation, imbibed with the fibres of a rich, colourful culture, as well as deep heritage. This place has shown me how much value rests in the places we come from, and the histories we carry with us. After all, how can we know where we are, who we are, or where we’re going if we don’t know where we’ve been? All of us are different, and none of our journeys look the same, but we are all here. No matter where we all come from, or the path that our journey may have taken, we have all found a way to arrive at the same destination.
It’s hard to imagine a world different than your own unless you get the chance to climb into the boots of someone else and take a stroll in theirs. Once you experience the world from another perspective, the world you knew begins to seem much smaller. A big piece of growth we can all experience could simply be taking a moment to realise how important the journey is, and how important all of our journeys are. After all, we don’t all know where we’re going, but we all know where we are, and where we’ve been. Cheers to Heritage Day for showing us that.
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