Man Out Of Time

(Source)

One of the standing comments that The Ravishing Mrs. TB has about me is that I was born about 200 years too late.  I would have been far happier, she maintains, had I been a 19th Century English Squire, comfortably wealthy enough to not have to work and engage in the serious acts of reading, writing, thinking, and developing small mad hobbies like keeping sheep or growing different varieties of grain.

It is a fair assessment and one that I own up to - after all, that grain is not going to grow itself.  But beyond the gentle poking at my rather esoteric and perhaps not quite modern world useful interests lies an actual truth:  in a meaningful way, I do not belong to this time.

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If arguably the 20th Century represented a time of transition (which, it could be argued, the 19th Century did as well:  One could have been born in 1700 and died in 1800 and the world would have been very similar while a person born in 1800 and living to 1900 saw a completely different one).  When I grew up, my grandparents' generation was alive with memories back to a rural or agriculture past which for them was not a hobby but a way of life. Even in my parent's generation this was true:  my father and his family picked fruit in orchard or worked in fruit packing sheds and my mother's family still visited ancestral lands where mining had taken place within their lifetime.  I was on the tail end of this, my childhood a mix of the "new" world of technology and convenience and reminders in the form of living people and objects of a time before such technology.

Perhaps as a result, I grew up looking like the Doubleheaded eagle that graced the flags of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Russian Empire, and the Byzantine Empire (and now the Orthodox Church).  They looked both East and West; I looked both to the past and future. 

But one cannot look both ways forever; it is a terrible way to make any sort of forward progress.

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The more things push forward, the more important it seems to me to keep the elements of what was left behind - The "Old Ways", as the picture above suggests.

There is value in being able to do something yourself:  sew a shirt, grow a garden, plane wood to make cabinets, make cheese, raise livestock.  And there is value in doing things in analog form:  reading books, writing letters, keeping time on non-digital timepieces, playing music.  

The value is not just in the output - honestly, one almost never "makes" any money doing it.  The value is in the skills that are gained and the knowledge that is passed on.

I can use The Tube of You to find out how to do almost anything. What I cannot do is to have the skill that those folks have to do them. Often theirs is earned by years or decades of practice; it cannot be earned by a 20 minute video and three trips to the store for supplies.

The "Old Ways" are also power - the power of independence, the power to think by one's self and act by one's self to complete actions.  One can be interdependent in the exercise of such things, but one is never truly dependent - reliant 100% on the skill and value of another to complete needful or even pleasurable things fueled by our ability to pay for them.

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The older I get, the more and more these Old Ways matter to me.

I read physical books instead of electronic ones. I make certain foods for myself instead of purchasing them.  I try (not always successfully) to divorce myself from the technology of the age as much as possible, especially given that I spend so much time on it for my work.

Am I wiser or smarter or somehow better off for having done such things?  Not that I can tell - but I have passed aspects of this onto my own children, who each in their own way follow The Old Ways. 

 

And perhaps that, in the end, is the ultimate value of them:  Not that we practice them, but that we pass them on.