From the post:
"As I get older, I remember times like that more and more. I can remember the smell of the smoke from the sap being boiled, the wood waiting to go into the fire, the mud, the snow. The spring sunshine just starting to make the days a little more pleasant after a long winter.
I remember my grandfather, not a man to express his feelings in words, more by deeds. My Dad, always trying to teach us boys not to be idiots, he had his work cut out for him with me! Mom and Gram in the kitchen, cooking and/or baking something."
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That post - those words - resonate with me on a couple of levels.
One is simply the remembering of times long ago, something made more real by the fact that - sooner or later - a place I have a great many childhood and adult memories of, The Ranch, will pass to other hands. In visiting my parents' house, I have the memories of myself as an adult and Na Clann when they were children, largely suburban children in a forested wonderland. In visiting my Aunt and Uncle's house - the house that belonged to my Great Aunt and Great Uncle - I have my own boyhood memories, of chickens and walking through a barn filled with all kinds of weird and wonderful things, of watching my dad change his oil and going with him and my Great Uncle to burn brush in the Winter, of family reunions and sitting in my Dad's lap driving the Ford 9N tractor.
Is it fair to call them simpler times? Perhaps, although I am sure to adults living in those times, they likely seemed no simpler than my life today. Much of what for us is automated was for them manual, meaning more time spent doing things. You could not have anything you wanted drop shipped to your door step within a day, so you made do with what you had and what your local retailers had. The health issues we consider resolvable today were not then; we take cancer cures and artery cleanouts for granted when in those days they were death sentences.
The second thing that resonates with me is just the noticing of details.
Modern life, in that aspect, does a number on us. For many or most of us, our lives are largely defined by the buildings we work in. Our time outside is a walk from the house or apartment to the car, from the car to the office or light commercial building or industrial site or store we work at, and then the reverse when we go home. Too often what we see or experience of The Real World is seen through glass or screens, temperatures only experienced in the moments where we do not have climate control. Communications with others - especially significant others, like friends or family - are too often words on a glowing screen or the odd electronic voice through a phone call. Food is both abundant - and the same; we have strawberries all the time instead of in season.
One could argue we have gained fresh (but not necessarily good) fruit and on-time delivery at the cost of our souls.
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Am I calling for some kind of return to some sort of pre-Modern era?
Not necessarily, no. I do enjoy climate control. And frankly, the health benefits alone in that so many formally fatal diseases are now treatable and curable are, in my mind, a pretty strong reason to be thankful.
But it does make me ask two things of myself:
1) Am I creating those memories for others that were created for me? Arguably in our transient world of commercialism and virtual reality (instead of in-person reality), it is harder than ever to get the sort of Real World memories that are not things like shows we watched or games we played.
2) Am I taking time to appreciate the world in its beauty and complexity as I can? Do I look at the sunrises and sunsets for a moment instead of rushing to my car? Do I rejoice and even look wistfully at the clouds and rain (outside my window right now), or consider them a nuisance to be moved through as quickly as possible?
Do I enjoy and make use (in that sense) of the Real World, or is it simply a place that I inhabit?
Can't remember how many times the parents and I went camping when I was growing up TB, pitch the tent, set up the cots (no sleeping on the ground no sir) and sleeping bags, visiting how many state parks in my home state. Then there were the times Dad took me grouse hunting when I got old enough, day trips ending in the dark upon returning home, tired out from walking miles of old lumber trails and woods Up North in the state.......good times. How many people now spend 24/7 with their horizon completely surrounded with man-made structures? As a result too many think Man > than Nature. Excuse the old man rant......:)
ReplyDeleteNylon12, we camped in state parks as well when I was growing up (I suspect, in retrospect, it was the vacation we could afford). And the endless trips to The Ranch, of course.
DeleteUrbanization is, I suspect, an outcome of a modern society. What is not - as you suggest - is a complete disconnection with Nature or "Nature as an Object outside of me", a thing to be thought of in the abstract and viewed through a screen in pictures and video.
When it comes to remembering good memories long ago, I often think about the book and movie 11.22.63 in which a school teacher essentially finds a portal to go back in time to an era when things were much different. Unlike him, I have no real desire to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but it would be kind of nice to go back and revisit a number of good times in my life.
ReplyDeleteEd, somewhere in my "short stories I have written" there is a work similar to that, where there is the opportunity to go back and redo one action in your life. It was a pretty interesting thing to write, because I knew (in the real world) what that exact moment was.
DeletePerhaps our childhood memories seem like simpler times is because we weren't burdened with adult problems and cares. Or at least my parents shielded us from them and protected our precious childhood. We were allowed to just be kids.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there is ever a going back. There is only going forward. Wisdom, however, enables us to discard the things that distract, complicate, or otherwise add no true value to our lives and experiences. Hopefully it reminds us that, just maybe, we don't need life to be as fast-paced and complicated as the world presses on us.
Leigh - There is, as you suggest, no going back - which saddens me a bit to be honest; a simpler life that was simpler not just in the complexity of modern living but in the very nature of its being is something that I truly wish for. In that sense, I do really wish that I could go back to a more innocent era, at least for myself, where there were just "things" I neither knew nor needed to know. Life does not grant us that of course; it is always messier and grittier than we prefer.
DeleteThe best, as you suggest, is perhaps just finding the ability to simplify our lives as they now are, especially in reducing the number of things that distract us or complicate it.
W. in CA
ReplyDeleteOh, for the wisdom Lord, in how to respond. There is a great burden of grief as I reflect on days gone by. How can things be as they are? In faith I have searched for the answers. As a family, as our society...how has man become what we have?
The tendancy is to pull in and do for self now. We have lost our way by rejecting God and not valuing life. Where did this start? Long before us, but advancement on all fronts has made us our own gods and we do what is right in our own eyes. How I would love to be a part of the earlier generations. I look back and don't see the specific point where we could have made the most difference to keep life simple and sacred, the gift that it is, the treasure we are to each other. Was it prayer taken out of school that damaged the future? Was it the mass distraction of TV coming into each home? Was it birth control and abortion that made us the self seeking creatures we have become that no longer value any life but our own, even our families?
I understand the grief in the eyes of my grandparents, though I think they had hope in the younger generations. I don't think they realized we were outnumbered by those rebellious ones they produced. It is a hard fight for those even younger who never knew those blessed values we were granted a short time to learn from.
I'm praying for mission, a ministry from the Lord. My works for good by my own hands and desires fall flat. I'm tired of being looked at as an oddity for trying to be so nice and compassionate. What a strange thing to have people surprised when you check back with them because of a prayer request they made. They are shocked you still remember and are still praying.
Well, I guess I'm working on tomorrow's subject a bit!
W - I do not fool myself that life has ever been as "innocent" as I would like to believe it has been - as Leigh suggests above, it has always been complicated. Evil has always been in the world; perhaps the difference is that for a time it was less noticeable than usual.
DeleteFor myself, perhaps the best I can do is simply focus on where and what I put my attention and my energy into.
W. in CA
ReplyDeleteKindness is the subject usually for Sunday! That's what I was referring to.
W - My fault; I accidentally "published" a day early.
DeleteTB, I suppose it's too obvious to say, but I think times appear simpler in hindsight because we weren't connected to the "news" or social commentary 24/7 in our childhoods (or frankly, most of my adult life). While I fondly think of the days when I didn't wear or carry my phone with me everywhere I went, I don't know that I would voluntarily go back to only having landlines, or not being able to send a quick text to anyone I please. It's a thing to wrap one's mind around that with help literally a button-push away, we are surely safer today than at anytime in the last century, but because we are hyper aware that tragedy can happen in just a few seconds (as we seem to see daily on the news or social media), it feels as if we are very much less safe.
ReplyDeleteOn a larger scale, we also do know we live in a much less safe world with each passing year. Toxins slowly and silently poison us; life savings can be swiped from a bank account in seconds; health insurance companies have more say in our fate than we like to consider; weapons of mass destruction lay waiting for someone to "push a button". It's kind of amazing we are brave enough to crawl out of bed every morning...
Okay, I think I went off on a tangent you probably weren't contemplating. All I can say is, when you get us thinking, anything can show up here in the comments.
Becki - I enjoy wandering thoughts; I am a great practitioner of them myself.
DeleteThere are tradeoffs, to be sure. I can communicate with anyone I know instantly. I have access to essentially the entire history of the world at my fingertips. I eat like a king every day on flatware only the rich could have afforded 200 years ago with access to hot and cold running water that was not common even 60 year years ago.
And yet we find ourselves in a world where we are often increasingly fragmented and (as you point out) increasingly less in control of our own existence in so many ways. All the information in the world is not any good if it is not easily accessible; access to water and plates and the daily things of living for most of us are dependent on jobs where we do one thing and then take the money for that time and use it for everything else.
I do not know I have an answer either. I do wonder if there comes a point at which we look at where we are and ask "Is it all really worth it?"