New Things, Old Things
... bygones
It's that time of year when your trash is overflowing with the detritus of the holiday season. New things. Made on the other side of the world, wrapped in plastic, wrapped in cardboard … your brain 🧠 triggers that flood of dopamine when you ripe open the package.
A year from now if ask anyone what they got for Christmas last year, you will get a blank stare.
What's better? New things, or old things?
You can pick any river that winds a long deeply cut path through the prairie, and with little effort find old things, from another era, calling for your attention and imagination. Once, those things were new.
Like the people that handle them, objects of someone's creation, become old, warn, and simply forgotten.
Every year that passes reminds me that no matter how hard I fight against it, time grinds all things down … pride, physical power, a sharp mental edge, family, things once familiar.
An old utensil handle, once fed and kept alive it's ancient user. Snapped, broken, lost, and then found a century later.
What where they doing there, who were they? Who did they love, what did they dream about?
I think it's fair to say that being well worn can bring it's out special kind of beauty, something hard to replicate. Only a fool would spurn old things, rather than contemplate them and learn from them.
Before you stood in that spot, someone else did. Someone will stand where are right now, 200 years from now, with your spoon in their hand, wondering what you did with your life.
How should we deal with such things? Someone once said, “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day will bring.”
If happiness and health, be happy and use every last minute to do good to your fellow man. Don't be trapped, like the fox’s paw in the iron teeth, because you stuck your nose where you shouldn't.
That smartphone will steal the best years of your life, for nothing but a digital high that fades quickly.
Instead, put your hand to the dirt, the earth, and tree around you, and those you hold dear. Neither you nor them will go on ad-infinitum, there is an end to all things.
I suggest to see what you can do here and now, while today is available to you. Walk in the woods and snow, inspect the tracks of the squirrel 🐿️, see where he went and what he was up to.
Look and see if something nefarious was after him.
There is a world 🌎 of interesting things right outside your door, that has housed people similar to you for a few thousand years. They probably inspected the same running water you will.
Picked up the forgotten detritus of those that came before them, inspecting something old that was once new.
At my age, it's hard to pet bygones be bygones, looking to the past, you could easily waste the now looking to the past and waiting for something, or someone, that will never return. I make it my business to study and collect the past, how do we honor the past without worshipping it?
Today I reminisce about my Grandmother, who at the ripe old age of 97 was just gathered to her ancestors.
I think about that farm I grew up on, the large grove of oaks she cared for that I shot pheasants and rabbits out of. The old red barn she kept standing that stood like a forgotten outpost, in a long forgotten place.
Even back those decades ago it was place filled out old things that captured the imagination of a young boy, and still does. The old grinding wheel, the corn cob crib, the half buried farm equipment from another century.
I will never forget hitching up the Allis Chalmers to the hay wagon, while a loud group of aunts, uncles, cousins, and miscellaneous nar-do-wells piled on board to sing and wind our way down the gravel roads to nowhere.
I suppose that is how you live a life.
We can create those memories now, for the young and lonely around us, in other minds, so they remember the kindness and laughter of a good friend.