Each blog I write looks at aspects of our lives that affect us, perhaps even what we do every day.
I don’t know about you, but I’m barraged with social media all around me, it cuts into my day and my personal life. Every day I seldom stop ‘till I get home from work. If a workday is eight hours (and that’s an optimistic number), then there may be another hour or more commute time, time to cook and eat, leaving the time left, and we’re lucky if we can get eight hours sleep. I’m sure that the kind of crazy schedule applies to the majority of us. So, I seldom think about my time limitations, let alone compare them to what it was like in the past for me or my parents.
Courtesy Microsoft Clip Art ®2010
Sometimes I look around me and think of my family home and lifestyles back then. I think my life is different now because of technology, different location, newer habits, etc., but, if I stop and really think about it, I realize I still do many of the same things my parents did. I may fix different things for breakfast and other meals, go to work, and try to get together with friends and family when I can. Is my life so different from what it was in growing up? For most of us, it is. But if we stop and think about it for a few minutes, we may find we still have a few things around us that are reminders from the past. We may have an old cookie mold, or a cream pitcher of our mothers. We may have even kept a painting from our old house. if we look at those objects, what do they remind us of?
Those keepsakes can make us reflect a little, just like the ads we see that try to get our attention. We humans have used these creations to ‘speak’ for them to us for eons. They send us messages, the same way we humans have tried to communicate for thousands of years. Today, we go to museums, travel to archeological sites, look at how our ancestors lived and what they left for us. We see paintings on cave walls from many thousands of years ago that were primitive messages and wonder what they wanted to convey. Could their representations have any relevance to modern humans? What could those signs and symbols tell us, and could there be lessons from them we can use in our lives today?
If we think they have nothing to do with us, then maybe we might want to think again. Twenty-First Century humans have all kinds of innovations, our language has evolved all over the world, and surely, we’ve progressed beyond daily routines and diets of earliest humans. But we still have the same body functions, still want to worship something or someone, and when we explore their age-old ruins, we still recognize many signs and gestures humans used for millennia. If we spend even five minutes looking at these things, we can quickly discover that they were trying to communicate with future generations so long ago.
We’ve evolved in so many ways, but human instincts remain. We still work to civilize our lives using signs every day—in words and sentences, pictures and stories, even in technology.
So, drawings on the cave walls of our forbearers gave us graphic examples of how to survive and progress into who we are today. Yes, they were much more primitive, but those tools continue in new communication forms, and we use them to teach our progeny about the past, present, and future.
So, we’ve talked about a few things that have contributed to who we are as a species, a little about our families, and how these have formed the foundations of who we are.
I’m not a psychologist, but I know that echoes of it all affect us daily in different ways. What affected us 200 years ago caused our predecessors to migrate here and other parts of the world, and factors, like faith and fear emboldened them and still reappear in our hopes, fears, and aspirations. That’s why, when we get uncomfortable in certain environments, or when we find ourselves suddenly feeling afraid, we may just be repeating a familiar inherited pattern. Or, conversely, if we feel something is comfortably familiar or makes us feel good, it may fit a recognized pattern from long ago.
We don’t necessarily need to go on a quest to analyze every single thought or feeling we have, but just to stop every now and then to ‘get outside’ of our routine. I’ll be your big advocate for permitting you to let go of your feelings of ‘I gotta…’have to’…’must do immediately’, at least for a few minutes…Take a deep breath and feel alive. It won’t hurt you and it might just open you up to be in the moment and to enjoy it!
