IN between the cat videos and scenes of Bollywood dances dutifully performed at various cousins’ weddings are a different set of clips. These clips feature colourised images of some of the first ‘films’ ever made. Some of them, taken in the 1800s, show people from the Victorian age peering into camera. On the faces of these long dead people is the same expression with which we view the advancements of technology today — a mix of curiosity, wonder and bewilderment. Time travel may not yet have been invented but this sort of recreation provides a glimpse of the people of the past — ordinary like us, unique like us and long dead as all of us will be.
There is a very particular reason I seek out these images of the past. Such is the self-absorbed solipsism of human nature that even as we are certain about our own finality we sink deep into the quagmire of petty problems. As we drive to work and back home, as we do the many tasks that life requires, we are beset by them. We agonise over what will happen, what will not, why a certain person spoke so rudely and was indifferent, whether our bosses like us, and why our relatives look at us with envy. The list is endless. Small disruptions in our lives, an illness, car trouble, a leaking roof, or water shortage can throw our mental peace off balance. We get frustrated, we are consumed — and most of the time we cannot help it.
This overwhelming sense of unease is compounded if decision-making is even more momentous: which career to choose, to migrate or not, to marry this one or that. The significance of these choices weighs heavily upon us and quickly gets inflated and becomes a do-or-die moment. Such are the games that our minds play on us that we narrow our perspective to our small enclosures, our families, our little worlds; against them these questions appear large and looming.
This is where apertures into the past can help us. In moments where I have felt the great stress of big decisions or the myriad small stresses of life in general, I turn to what I call ‘big history’. I use the term to reference the lives of people who lived thousands of years ago.
If we can only get through life without causing hurt and pain to others then that is in itself enough.
The earliest agricultural settlements of the Neolithic age showed up around 10,000 years ago. One such settlement that included thousands of people can be found in Turkey. Çatalhöyük had up to 8,000 people living there for centuries. The carefully reconstructed homes of the people here show small rooms with walls decorated with geometric mosaics. Interior decor, therefore, was a thing that long preceded later civilisations. Human beings were living in homes and trying to make them beautiful.
As they are for us, the myriad petty problems of life, who got a larger share of the hunt, whose house was more beautiful, and who had more animal skulls to display, were likely concerns for the people of this ancient agricultural settlement.
There are a lot of questions about the residents of this settlement: what they ate, how they lived, what prompted them to bury their dead under the floors of their homes, why the openings of their homes were closer to the roof than to the ground, etc.
These answers are not well known, but the real magic of the stories of these people lies in their similarity to our lives, even though they dwelt in a past that is almost unimaginable to us. Scientists have shown that the human genome has not changed much at all since those days. In evolutionary terms, our ways of thinking, of processing information are not very different.
The benefit of immersing yourself in epochs long gone, particularly those stretching many centuries into the past, is that it immediately changes the scale at which we assess our own lives. Like the people of the past, there are little emblems: why we bury our dead the way we do, why we wear loose tunics and trousers, adorn our faces with different kinds of paint, etc.
When we investigate the past, we see ourselves from the vantage point of our future and realise how trivial our daily concerns and consternations really are. Such is the power of scaling our perspective. When we consider the trivialities of these past lives, we realise that the decisions and choices facing us, the judgement calls, the suffering and pain of life, are just as humdrum as they have always been. When we consider the lives of those who lived 10,000 years ago, the total of our civilisation seems like the tiniest blip in the story of human existence.
Scale then delivers its own kind of freedom. When we keep the tremendous brevity of our moment in time in mind, we realise that nothing that we do is really that important beyond the meaning and import that we bestow on it ourselves. All achievements, all wins, and all losses will dissipate when we do. Our children and grandchildren may remember who we are but a few generations after that we would have been forgotten, our peculiarities, our singularities will all be gone.
If we can only get through life without causing hurt and pain to others then that is in itself enough. Knowing that our particular lives only really bear importance for the smallest aperture in the history of humankind makes us free, less afraid of making poor judgement calls and mistakes. Suddenly, as if by magic we realise how truly insignificant in the grand scheme of things our fears and concerns really are. In that knowledge there is sweet and forgiving deliverance from the inexorable march of life.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, July 31st, 2024
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