Living on the Inside of History
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“For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war.”
― Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
At each age in our life we think we will feel different when we have grow bigger, or accomplished more. Throughout our life we think that we will become something different at a later date. When I am sixteen I will be so confident. When I am married I will be happy. When I am 30 I will be so responsible and feel so old. When I have children I will be self assured. Of course when we reflect, we discover that this is not the case; and in fact we feel exactly the same. Where ever we go and whatever we achieve, we take ourselves with us. In large part adulthood is the discovery that adults are just larger children.
My wife and I began dating in college and became adults together. I remember a conversation I had with her years ago when she was confounded that people our age could act so irresponsibly, yet were allowed to do adult things like join the work force, marry, and have children. “I always felt like someone would not allow this” she told me. “You thought that there were adult police” I had mused in agreement. Even though I sometimes wish that there were “adult police”, I have come to accept that they do not exist.
Just as we cannot believe that we won’t will be different as we age we also refuse to believe that the world will not stay the same. We can accept by 30 or 40 that fashion changes and that we no longer know what music is cool. We cannot accept, however, that things that are not allowed to happen continue to happen all around us. Things happen to our Democracy. Things happen to our perception of the world. Things happen that mean society, culture and our norms may no longer return. Big things! Permanent things! Things that mean the world is different and cannot be righted.
These are all old problems. And old stories. They are just not our stories. We myopically believe that these things are allowed to happen to other people, not to us. We study these things happening in history, but not to people like us who are just living our lives. The endo of empire and the end of an age are only allowed to happen in books. These history books are about the same planet that live on, but we feel detachment. We want to study the lessons of history while being exempt from its laws.
Over and over in the past year I have watched clients realize that they are living inside history. It is something they all knew intellectually in their brains, but had not yet accepted in their hearts. They knew these realities were true intellectually, but could not bear to feel the emotional implications of their truth. We all have a tendency to pretend that we are exceptions to history, or even worse, its protagonist! The Drive By Truckers once sang, The secret to a happy ending is knowing when to roll the credits, but history has no happy ending because it has no end.
Louis CK once told a joke.
“Is there life after death?”.
“Of course, It’s just not yours!”.
CK’s point is not about whether or not there is an after life, but about our own natural solipsism. The question of life after death only matters to us because it will be our life after death. If it is someone else’s we do not care. Maybe all the dead folks in the history book you were just reading felt the same way.
Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian whose quotation opens this article, wrote a firsthand account of political upheaval and imperial decline into reactionary politics and cultural decay. He wasn’t writing the ancient history of his culture but the contemporary account of history as it unfolded around him. He wrote with the understanding that the moment that he was in would one day be, well, history. If you haven’t read it, you really owe yourself the favor, because it is one of the most personally affecting works of the ancient world. I’ll resist the urge to quote the text a dozen more times if you will take my word for the fact that much of the text could be articles in The New York Times today.
The oft used quotation that “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it” seems to have missed the point of our history as I read it. We are doomed to repeat it, literate or not. History repeats because people repeat and we have to learn these lessons for ourselves with our own lives. Some lessons cannot be learned intellectually but need to be understood through felt emotional experience. We cannot learn it from books because we mistakenly believe that those books are about other people, not us.
The only way that we can learn from history is to have the humility to realize that we are the people in the books, and that our time outside of those books is brief. This is an important lesson to teach our patients. As therapists we are often guilty of allowing ourselves and our patients to get so caught up in the routine of the day that we never look at our lives on the outside and ask ourselves why we are here. An existential lens to chart ones life can be a powerful gift.
Often patients that do look to history will view it as a cage and tell themselves this is what I have to do or this is what I have to be. In therapy I see so much psychopathology stem from clients attempting to “solve” the problems of our current place in history.
They take all the responsibility for fixing the world. I hear “I don’t know how we fix this” over and over while I sit in my chair. We want all the power or none of it. If I am not allowed to see the solution, to lead the revolution than I want no part. This is the messiah complex. Either I get to save the whole world or I will feel hopeless and retreat into nihilism. This inclination is not adult and will stop us from being effective at anything. The truth is that we all have some power, just not a lot of it. Our ego does not like these limitations to self expansion.
We have to accept the modicum of power and responsibility that we do have. We all have some responsibility for what we leave behind in the world, but saving society is not our job. Our responsibility is our mindful contribution to history and ours alone. If we had infinite time maybe we could learn all the lessons of history and transcend time. Yet, history has no certainty for us and no end. It is important that therapists and patients learn how to sit with both the mystery and the symmetry of time. Things will repeat but not on our terms, and not for us.
When we were only several hundred-thousand years old, we built stone circles, water clocks. Later, someone forged an iron spring. Set clockwork running. Imagined grid-lines on a globe. Cathedrals are like machines to finding the soul; bells of clock towers stitch the sleeper’s dreams together. You see; so we’ve always been on our way to this new place — that is no place, really — but it is real. It’s our nature to represent: we’re the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps. And if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors of our calendars with the true weather of days, and the parchment’s territory of our maps with the land spread out before us — never mind. We have always been on our way to this new place — that is no place, really — but it is real.
Memory Palace by William Gibson
The sight of ruins invokes a somber melancholy in us because it is subtle reminder that we are not special just because we are existing right now. It asks us to give up our sense of entitlement to feeling that our culture, our religion or our life is wholly unique. At some point we must trade our naivety for wisdom and this is painful but necessary. We must give up our right to self importance if we are ever to discover what actually makes us unique and important. There is no agreeable, absolute meaning to human life.
We must become “unstuck” from our present time if we ever want to just stop simply existing and decide what the purpose of our existence is. We do not get to choose the times we are born into or how much time we are given. The best thing that we can do for the state of history is to examine ourselves and decide what it is we want to do with our time here and what we want to leave behind. We are all given one unique thumbprint to leave on the walls of time, but that is all. The world does not need another cumulated average of all the cultural, familial, and social norms that you were told to embody. Instead you must learn to discover what you truly want to be underneath these things. History needs you to see beyond these things if we are ever going to make a positive contribution to the state of the world.
“When one has let go of that great hidden agenda that drives humanity and its varied histories, then one can begin to encounter the immensity of one’s own soul. If we are courageous enough to say, “Not this person, nor any other, can ultimately give me what I want; only I can,” then we are free to celebrate a relationship for what it can give.”
― James Hollis, Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other
The only way to discover your thumbprint is to learn how to know yourself. We must examine ourselves honestly and without fear. On the surface it looks like we make so many choices but beneath these we are only ever making one choice . Will you become what you want to be, or will you run from this task? Is it too scary to be hurt or judged?
Something deep within you is truly unique and special, but it is not the protective parts our ego clings too to make us feel special. History is running an experiment with us at every moment. We can can either run the experiment to the end or give up. We cannot not run another person’s experiment. In every moment we choose to discover who we really are and what we can contribute. That, or or abandon the mission. We see many choices when in truth it is only one. Are you brave enough to become yourself, or will you run from that calling?
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
