So Whom Did Those Shoes Walk Over?
By Dr. Nurfer TERCAN
Some ancient traditions do not speak at length. They place an object before a person and fall silent.
Leaving the shoes of the deceased on the threshold of the door, and giving away the clothes left behind without keeping them long, should not be read merely as an old ritual about death. There is a far more shattering knowledge of life within it: one more person has gone. Everything they carried on them remains in the world.
Their shoes…
Their clothes…
Their house…
Their desk…
Their office…
Their title…
The wealth they accumulated…
The doors that were opened to them…
All the epithets they added before and after their name…
After a while, all of it dissolves into other people’s worlds.
But perhaps the real question is not whether these things will be left behind.
The real question is this: What kind of person were we while attaining all of this? Could we be remembered as a human being?
Because it is not enough to look at the shoe left on the threshold and say only, “it will walk no more.”
One must also look at the sole of the shoe.
Where did that shoe pass while its owner was alive?
More importantly:
Whom did it walk over?
Those Left Beneath the Shoe!
At the end of life, a person should not ask themselves only “What did I gain?” — or else they are one who does not ask at all…
Perhaps there are far heavier questions than that:
Whose knowledge did I use to rise?
Whose idea did I carry as if it were my own?
On whose labour did I write my own name?
Whose trail did I recount as my own achievement?
Whose thinking did I use and then render invisible?
Whose knowledge did I take, and then, by ignoring them, manufacture a superiority for myself?
And beneath that shoe I have left on the threshold, whom did I once crush?
Did I gain the upper hand with the knowledge of the person I crushed and afterwards ignored?
Did I strengthen my position with their labour?
Did I polish myself with their idea?
Did I mistake their silence for my own talent?
Did I describe their being forced to step back as my own rise?
This is where a person’s true encounter with themselves begins.
For no success is measured by its outcome alone.
The road to success has its ethics too.
A person may have climbed very high; but unless they say on whose shoulders they stepped as they rose, the story of that height is not complete.
A person may know a great deal; but the moment they forget how much of their knowledge came from the labour of others, knowledge ceases to be a virtue and turns into an instrument of superiority.
A person may reach a high office; but if the office, while enlarging them, has shrunk their conscience, is there truly any rise to speak of?
Shining with Someone Else’s Light
This is one of the most invisible injustices of our age.
People can now consume not only one another’s material labour, but also one another’s knowledge, ideas, concepts, experience, networks of relationships, and even dreams.
A person thinks for years.
Researches.
Develops an idea.
Builds a project.
Produces a concept.
Opens a path.
Then someone with a more powerful office, a more visible name or broader means arrives; takes that thought, places it inside their own world, and in time renders the true owner of the idea invisible.
A very strange form of theft emerges:
No belongings have been stolen.
No money has been taken.
Yet a person’s intellectual labour has been displaced.
What is more, the one who does this may in time even come to believe that the thought truly belongs to them.
For power does not only silence others.
Sometimes it also rewrites a person’s own memory.
This is where the most dangerous side of office reveals itself.
Office does not merely give a person authority; it can also give the illusion of seeing the labour of those around them as their own light.
Yet to shine by holding someone else’s light upon oneself is not to be enlightened.
The Person After the Office
One of modern man’s greatest delusions is to mistake the place he occupies for himself.
He takes his office for his personality.
His title for wisdom.
His wealth for worth.
The crowd around him for esteem.
He takes the obligatory respect people show him for their affection.
Then one day the office ends.
The name on the door changes.
The phone calls grow fewer.
The crowd disperses.
And what remains is the person.
On that day a much harder question arises:
Who am I without my office?
How much of the respect shown to me was for me, and how much for the chair I sat in?
Was I truly powerful, or was it the institution behind me that was powerful?
Was I truly knowledgeable, or did I appropriate the knowledge of the people around me?
Was I truly successful, or was I merely the visible face of other people’s invisible labour?
These are not easy questions.
But the most valuable questions a person can ask themselves are often not the comforting ones, but the ones that disturb.
When the Clothes Are Given Away
That is why the prompt giving away of the clothes left behind is also such a powerful symbol.
For clothing is the identity a person displays to the outside world.
But one day that garment passes to another body.
Your jacket is on someone else’s shoulders.
Your watch on someone else’s wrist.
Someone else sits at your desk.
Your business card is no longer valid.
There is another name on the door of your office.
The people who rose to their feet for you yesterday are walking into someone else’s room today.
Thus life teaches a person a very harsh but very plain truth:
Most of what we possess does not actually belong to us; it has only been given to us to use for a while.
What, then, is the thing we truly own?
Perhaps only how we behaved during that time.
What Should a Person Accumulate?
If the shoes are to remain on the threshold…
If the clothes are to be given away…
If the offices are to be handed over…
If the wealth is to change hands…
To multiplying what should a person devote their life?
Perhaps the wrong question of our age is this:
“How high can I rise in life?”
The real question ought to be a different one:
“What will I turn into as I rise?”
For rising is not a virtue in itself.
One can rise by pushing another down.
One can rise by using someone else’s idea.
One can rise by standing beside the powerful and ignoring the powerless.
An office can be kept not by speaking where one ought to be silent, but also by being silent where one ought to speak.
So the issue is not how high a person has climbed.
The issue is how much of their humanity they managed to take with them on the way up to that height.
One Day Our Shoes Will Remain on the Threshold
Let us look once more at that old image.
A door.
A threshold.
A pair of shoes.
And a person who will not return.
But this time let us look at the shoes differently.
On their soles there is not only the dust of the roads.
There is also the ethics of our life.
Perhaps someone’s labour…
Perhaps the silence of a broken person…
Perhaps a friend we ignored…
Perhaps a colleague whose idea we used…
Perhaps someone we forgot to thank…
Perhaps a person we crushed for the sake of rising…
Or perhaps someone to whom we did not give their due, though it was within our power.
The great question to be asked at the end of life is not only:
“What did I leave behind?”
There is one more question:
“Whom did I leave behind while obtaining the things I leave?”
Not how much money I earned:
Did I diminish anyone’s rightful share while earning that money?
Not how high I rose:
On whose shoulder did I step as I rose?
Not how much knowledge I acquired:
Did I remain faithful to the sources of my knowledge?
Not how many people knew me:
Could those who knew me closely feel safe in the face of my power?
Not how bright I appeared:
How much of the light I shone with was truly mine?
And perhaps the heaviest of all:
Whose knowledge did I use, and whom did I ignore, to establish my superiority; whose labour did I render invisible to make my office shine?
For a person’s true legacy does not consist only of the good they have done.
It also consists of the memory of what they did to whom.
One day all our clothes will be given away.
Our offices will pass to others.
Our names will be taken down from the doors.
Our shoes will remain on the threshold.
But in the memory of the people we leave behind, another record will go on living:
What we did when power was given to us.
Whether, when another’s labour came before us, we claimed it as our own or spoke its owner’s name.
Whether, when we met someone weaker than ourselves, we trampled over them or not.
Whether, when we benefited from a person’s knowledge, we made them a step in our ascent or gave them their due and walked beside them.
For a person’s greatness is understood not by how many people they rose above, but by how many people’s rights they were able to protect as they rose.
And perhaps we can read all of that ancient wisdom anew in a single image:
The shoe remains on the threshold.
But the point is not that the shoe remains there.
The real point is this:
Until that shoe arrived there, whom did it walk over, beside whom did it walk, and what kind of trace did it leave behind?
A person cannot take their shoes with them when they leave this world.
But neither can they erase the trace they left beneath their shoes.
That is why the greatest aim of life is not merely to be successful; it is to be able to live without leaving someone else’s crushed story inside our own story of success.
Notes from the Blue of the Windy City
https://www.5gvirusnews.com/yazarlar/ayakkabilar-esikte-kalir-h1948.html
Translated from the Turkish original.