When my children were grown, moved out, and I finally had both the time and financial ability to travel, I used to say something that sounded dramatic:
I wanted to see the world while there was still a world to see.
War.
Famine.
Natural disasters.
Human stupidity.
Pick your category.
My fear was that places on my bucket list would disappear before I ever had the chance to stand in them.
Not because time passed.
But because people destroyed them.
In 2024, I stood at Kyiv Pechersk Lavra in Ukraine and took this photo.
Yesterday, Russia struck the same historic religious complex.
And I cannot stop thinking about it.
Because this is exactly what I meant.
The places we dream of visiting do not exist in a protective bubble waiting for us to arrive.
They are vulnerable.
To bombs.
To fire.
To politics.
To greed.
To indifference.
To people who think destruction is easier than preservation.
Kyiv Pechersk Lavra was founded in 1051.
Nearly a thousand years ago.
People prayed there before the United States existed.
Before modern Russia existed.
Before most of the borders people argue about today had even been imagined.
For centuries, people have gathered there to worship, celebrate, mourn, and remember.
Empires rose.
Empires fell.
Wars came and went.
Governments changed.
The Lavra remained.
When I visited, I saw tourists taking photographs.
Families walking together.
Worshippers lighting candles.
Grandparents holding children’s hands.
Ordinary people living ordinary lives around an extraordinary place.
And that’s what I wish more people understood when they talk about Ukraine.
Far too often, the conversation sounds like a business negotiation.
A land deal.
A dispute over territory.
A line on a map.
As if giving away part of a country is no different than redrawing property boundaries.
But a country is not just land.
It’s churches.
It’s schools.
It’s neighborhoods.
It’s cemeteries.
It’s language.
It’s culture.
It’s history.
It’s memories.
It’s the places where people fell in love, got married, raised children, buried parents, and built lives.
It’s the places that tell people who they are.
Yesterday’s strike damaged a cathedral.
But the cathedral isn’t really the point.
The point is what disappears when people stop seeing places as homes and start seeing them as bargaining chips.
The point is what gets lost when history becomes collateral damage.
The point is that every missile destroys more than a building.
It destroys pieces of a story that can never be recreated exactly as they were before.
I look at this photograph differently today.
At the time, it was simply a travel photo.
Today, it feels like evidence.
Proof that I stood in a place that survived nearly a thousand years and still wasn’t safe from the choices of people living in the present.
When I started traveling, I said I wanted to see the world while there was still a world to see.
Standing in Kyiv in 2024, I didn’t realize how literal that statement would become.
Because the greatest threat to the places we treasure isn’t time.
It’s the belief that they’ll always be there tomorrow.
Sometimes they aren’t.
