Today, I stood at the DMZ –the border between North Korea and South Korea.
A line drawn by war. A line that still decides who belongs where.
It’s hard to describe the sadness of seeing a country split in two. Not just land, but lives. Families separated. Stories interrupted. Generations growing up on opposite sides of a decision they never made.
Standing there, the silence felt heavier than noise ever could.
I thought about the deaths –not as numbers, but as absences. Lives lost defending ideas, borders, strategies. And then I learned about Gloster Hill.
Young soldiers –the first UN troops to face complete destruction– fighting to hold ground for a country that wasn’t even theirs. These soldier from Gloster, UK would never return home. They are remembered here every year, –not as invaders or outsiders, but as people who showed up for something larger than themselves.
Their story shifted something in me.
Borders feel permanent when you look at them on a map. On the ground, they feel fragile. Artificial. Maintained only by memory, fear, and continued agreement to stay divided.
The memorials here don’t glorify war. They mourn it. They remind you that lines on land come at a human cost –one that lasts long after the fighting stops.
Today didn’t make me angry. It made me sad. And oddly hopeful.
Because if people can cross oceans to defend a place that wasn’t theirs, maybe one day we’ll stop pretending these lines define us at all.
We are not North or South.
Not us and them.
We are one species, sharing a small, borrowed planet.
Standing at the DMZ, that truth felt painfully obvious and urgently important.
