Whiplash

Daily we tell ourselves we’re moving forward with life. Pressing on with whatever we’re convinced are the important matters at hand.

It’s about such time that we frequently get another postcard from our past. Another reminder of where we have been in our life.

Every postcard, every reminder of our personal history is an opportunity to either stay mired in the mist of our personal mythologies or create new legends. It’s a fresh prospect of how we think about our lives — how we live all of our goals, not just material goals — and life in general.

In the early 1990’s I was working on a book about a prominent medieval figure. Language has changed tremendously in the eight hundred years since that person died. It was necessary to go back and reread original sources — that is, original sources translated into modern English. As it turned out, it’s not the same thing. Not even close. I made the mistake of thinking that the current meaning of words was the same as what those words meant eight hundred years ago.

They were written in a different language, different era and different country. Everything was different.

I was about to get whiplash from all my incorrect assumptions. My background as a Renaissance historian of a different country did me no good.

And then God struck.

A friend who is the world’s leading scholar on the subject agreed to let me stop by for a meeting. The minute I opened my mouth, she made me aware of my gross errors. My assumptions on the meanings of ordinary everyday words, ideas and concepts were way out of bounds. My eyes were opened to the fact that I was attempting to impose my modern American viewpoint on the medieval world.

I was wrong. Very wrong.

I had to be nimble to keep up with my medieval scholar friend. She had no time for wallowing in self-pity or other nonsense. She had other work to do. I had to drop my false ideas immediately and catch up with her. The woman has a very straightforward, businesslike approach to her work.

There is no pie in the sky. No delving into extraneous miscellanea.

There is no overthinking mistakes.

She had me move on with life.

She forced me to go deeper. Look further into another level of understanding. A level I never knew existed.

I walked away from that meeting with the knowledge that it had absolutely been the right thing to do. I had met with someone who knew the differences between history and legend versus mythology. She knew the minds of the men and women of another era. She knew how to translate their words and ideas into living modern concepts.

She knew how to make modern men and women get out of their own foolish ideas and deal with reality.

The courage and daring of this woman to constantly move forward in her life and her work is a challenge. It’s a challenge to all of us to stop being lazy. Start working to grow spiritually and intellectually. To be more in this moment than we were five minutes ago.

Whether we want it or not, sometimes a thunderstorm comes along and washes away our pink cloud. That pink cloud we have that tells us we think we know what we’re doing. We think what we’re doing is right. The beliefs — sometimes little more than whims — we have are wrong.

We’re using the wrong language to attempt to describe the realities of creation to ourselves.

I’m never quite sure whether to be baffled, amused or infuriated by the people who get stuck on old ideas. Ideas they first heard in childhood stick to them like glue on a hot summer day.

Look around. We have to open our eyes. Live life in the present ever aware of the past and the future.

We can’t afford to be stuck in the mistaken notions of our past. I am often convinced many people would still believe the earth is flat if they had not heard enough times that it is round. Even then….

If you don’t want to have whiplash from going around and around in a never-ending circle, get off your personal merry-go-round. Get your head out of your pink cloud.

Venture forward with your life.