The Past Through Today

Being old sucks.

Or I should say, "being oldER sucks." Here I sit, approaching fifty real damn fast, not being able to see as well as I once did, reliant on hearing aids, with an enlarged prostate, missing teeth, pronounced pattern baldness, and what hair I still have is rapidly turning gray. Not to mention that I walk with a cane (but then I’ve had the cane for twenty years now, result of a traffic accident, so it really doesn’t count).

And while complaining doesn’t really help, it feels good to gripe now and then. Perhaps it’s human nature to complain. It’s my nature, anyway. I think there’s something in all of us that makes us remember "the good old days" with fondness and nostalgia, even when "the good old days" weren’t all that good.

Which brings me to the point of this essay (which isn’t just to complain about being old). What I want to go into is the way we look at the past.

I’ve been involved in historical reenactment over the years (Medieval, that is; the Society for Creative Anachronism to be specific). When people hear that, they often ask me if I wish I had lived in Medieval times. I suppose "yes" is the standard answer, but it’s not the answer that I give. You see, if I had lived hundreds of years ago I would almost certainly have been dead by my age; dead of natural causes in an age when people didn’t live much past 45 but probably dead of diabetes or heart disease or any of the several conditions that I daily medicate myself against. Physically, I’m a wreck; in another, simpler age I’d be worm food.

When we turn to the past to find our identity, we tend to ignore the fact that times past tended to be harder than we’re used to; we think of them as simpler but in reality they’re just as complicated and in ways that we modern humans can’t really fathom. I may have learned to use a sword, but against someone who was raised to use a sword, who has been trained to use a sword from birth, whose life often depends of his being able to use a sword, I wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.

My point is, the "Golden Age" that we all turn to in our dreams, whatever age that may be (and it’s different for each of us), sucked in comparison to the times in which we now live. I have to laugh when, at a Medieval event in Medieval clothing living in a Medieval (-ish) shelter and doing Medieval (-ish) things, that people still look for a place where they can use their hand-held video games or recharge their cell phones or use their wifi or whatever. The "Quest for the Golden Age" runs only surface deep; cut us and we bleed coffee and diet cola.

And they weren’t "simpler" times, either. On the surface, blacksmithing may seem simpler than computer programming, but it ain’t. (Trust me; I’ve done both.) On the other hand, it isn’t entirely true that lives in the past were "nasty, brutish and short." (Thomas Hobbes, 1671) But it’s true enough. Anyone who says that they’d rather live in the past just hasn’t thought things through.

We live in an age where I can take insulin for my diabetes, where I can get a bypass for my clogged arteries, where we know what clogged those arteries and I can do something about it. I am alive today because I live in the modern age, and it would be ungrateful of me to wish that I lived in a time when I would have died long before. I may not like life much, but it beats the hell out of the alternative.

But still, feeling this way and believing as I do, I still spent all those years playing at being someone of a different age. Why? ‘Cause it was a hell of a lot of fun, and I’d be doing it still if life hadn’t intervened. That’s not the point. Yes, I looked to the past (as people often do) to find something that was missing in my life. I was lucky; I found what was missing even if, for a while, I had to find it in historic play-acting. But I never lost sight of the debt I owe the modern world. I honor the modern world even as I dress up in armor to go and bash away at some other Medieval enthusiast, who probably wishes he actually lived in times past.

That jerk.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.