Round and Round

I know, I know, many times I come across preachy and sometimes negative but there really is just cause ya know. I was never that interested in history as a kid. I was just caught up in life around me, all the bells and whistles as technology changed faster and faster and that everything was just going like it always goes not even being aware of just how true that statement was. Most of us just go with the flow. “Oh, a new phone, cool, I’ll take it”, “there was a tsunami in the Philippines? Oh, that’s way over there, I’m not concerned”. Things just like that. New technology has numbed us in a way that it’s just expected and common place now. And history? Well, I knew about the “big” things but still didn’t give much attention to it. So, in all that, what changed within me? Age. I got older and I started to pay attention instead of the quick fix distraction or the, it doesn’t concern me attitude. How or why, that happened I can’t really explain. I only know that something changed, no, not changed, something grew within me, and it began to flourish. I’m in my late 50’s now and I can take technology or leave it. I really appreciate the things it can do, like being able to blog on my laptop, like being able to call and even video chat with anyone in the world. But I don’t “need” it. I could survive just fine without it. But now take that word survive and put it into the context of history. That’s where my eyes became open. History is a wealth of knowledge if one chooses to first, see it, and then secondly, to understand it. With technology, we are able to access much more information, information at our fingertips literally. But it still takes a conscious mind to be aware of what history is and what history can teach us. It’s one thing to look at pictures of say, World War 2, and think, “wow, that was a scary time and many people suffered and glad it was back then”. And it’s another thing to read, to research, to understand, maybe, why that war was started, what was it about, who were the players, what did it cause, what happened afterwards. Things like that.

I used to look at history as this thing in the past. “Oh Rome, yeah they built a coliseum. That was the time of Jesus and Ceasar. Hitler? that was some crazy dude who tried to take over most of Europe and then the world. Native Americans? used to roam freely and now pretty much live on reservations that have casinos.” I was ignorant. And I was just really dumb. But I didn’t care to know any different. Then I got older. I know it sounds like a cliche, but it’s the truth. I got older and life started taking on a different shade. I started to come to terms with the finality of my own years. I started to see outside of just going round and round and that very act of going round and round had kept me going round and round all the more. Round and round and round. What’s the point. Well, that’s the whole question wrapped up in a nice little package now isn’t it. The point is, is that most of us, me included, are on this wheel of life that actually holds us in bondage. We are walking dead going to and fro with no real understanding of existence because that’s just the way life is. When we become aware of the wheel is when changes can occur. We look at things differently, we see things differently, we know things differently.

Technology isn’t a bad thing. It’s how it’s used that can be bad. And that goes along with history. History in itself is not bad or good, it’s just a window to see what was good and bad because of it. Kind of like an opportunity to know who we were, where we came from, what we are doing and maybe, just maybe, how to do things differently in the now and for the future. But sadly, more often than not, we don’t use nor understand that opportunity and seem to repeat history over and over again. We as a species have evolved through time and technology as we have gone but we haven’t always been the smartest. Climate change may occur as a natural existence on our planet but not at the speed the we humans are creating it. In the future we may look back through that picture frame of history and see what we did good or bad. But if we don’t make changes then we are just going to repeat, rinse and repeat. The wheel of life going round and round will always go round and round but will we use that experience to get to a different place? That’s my thoughts. That’s where I am today. History tends to repeat itself; we tend to repeat ourselves; but hopefully with enough vision and understanding of history and the wheel of life, we can make a new vehicle and understand things just don’t always have to be the same. We can be better. We must be better.