When I was a kid, the 19th of May always looked the same. Up early, hanging the flag with my mother, running to school. Poetry, gymnastics, the parade. “This holiday was given to you as a gift,” they used to say, “because you are children.”
I didn’t really get it back then. How can a holiday be a gift?
107 years ago today, Mustafa Kemal landed in Samsun. He had no money. No plan. No army. Just a decision. Enough faith to take a single step. One man, alone, stepping off a ship.
Later I understood. The gift in this holiday is the courage of that step — the courage to start something where everything had collapsed. That kind of courage lives most easily in young people. As we get older, we learn to say “it won’t work,” “leave it be,” “let someone else do it.” He left the young a door that says “yes, it can.”
The echo of that step still lives, I think, in anyone who finds the courage to start something today. The person reaching for an instrument for the first time, someone building from scratch, the one raising their hand in a crowd to say “I don’t know,” the one who keeps trying when everyone says “it won’t work.” All passing through the same door: the first small step into the unknown.
Years pass, the flag still hangs. The child grew up. Now it’s the turn of new children.
A peaceful holiday to everyone who still carries the courage to begin something.