The Past is Not Coming Back

Around this time of year, you start to see a lot of pictures of the olden days. You know, about how things were in the past. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like before the invention of photography and if we didn't have pictures like that to remind us of the way things were. Or I wonder if what we're really thinking of is the way we like to remember the way things were or if our memories are not, in fact, created, at least to some extent, by our imagination. What if we only had our memories? Would it be the same? So much of what we remember has been through years of remembering and living in the present, which is, after all, where we really live. It's just something to think about. I was reading in "The Disappearance of Childhood" by Neil Postman today about how much the invention of the printing press in 1440. A thought that struck me was his statement of how reading books was an "isolating" influence, which does seem to me to be the effect of every new technological advancement. Not necessarily as a negative experience, but very different, less complicated, perhaps more personal. Imagine, just your life with other people and your animals and your day-to-day life in, say, the 1800s. Well, think about not having books, magazines, newspapers, radio, television, computers, video games, smartphones, etc., and imagine that all you had was your family, your community, without all the inventions we take for granted today. You would have a simpler life, probably, and possibly less stressful. Life would be very different. Some people might say boring, but I would say, maybe it would not be boring at all. It is probably nearly impossible to know what it was like to live 150 years ago without our minds and lives having been changed as they have by having lived in the 20th and the 21st century. I can't learn enough about what life was like in the 19th century. I love to read about it. I like to imagine what it was like to gather with friends without movies or television, where people played charades or sang together or listened to someone play music and sing. Personally, though I wasn't there, I think we have lost more than we have gained since the 1880s. Every time I look at something online about that time in history, they always emphasize "the patriarchy" and "stereotypical gender roles," "masculine domination" and such terms. They look at history inevitably through today's eyes, which have only known what it's like today. I know, I'm rambling, and I'm going to wrap this up, but lately, I have been realizing what everybody really already knows, and that is, you can't bring back the past. It's gone, and it's not coming back. Many people have said something like, "Wherever you go, there you are," or "It is what it is," with a kind of resignation about it, and, of course, resignation is probably a pretty natural response, but there is something about the olden days that we can bring back into our lives if we choose to, and that is the role that religion used to play in American life. Religion played an important role in the early life of my parents' generation, and yet they lost their marriage, and there are so many families that has happened to, and yet that is something that did not have to be abandoned. It is one thing that anyone can bring back into their life by an act of their own choice. Everything can be lost, but no one has to lose their soul, and once people return to the one thing that never changes, they will find that life has meaning again, and all the blessings of life are as though they went from black and white to full color. And we can all quit longing for something that is gone. But I'm not gonna lie. I love those old pictures as much as you do.