About 100 degrees.
For three days. Humidity: 70 percent.
Such heat can add weary to worry, extreme to exhausted, and vaseline edges to focus. Even in air conditioning, the sun penetrates brick, mortar, steel, skin, and bone.
Yet and still, I saw people jogging.
In the park. Without a lion behind them, or an open full Brink’s truck rolling ahead of them.
These are not “my people”; they do not exhibit a logical measure of self-preservation, as any physical benefit of exercise is nullified once the body ceases function when all moisture is lost. Sure, mummies are thin, and those muslin straps are just fire, but they’re not really enjoying themselves.
I thought to myself, admittedly somewhat blearily, that these people “should know better” than to run in such dangerous weather. I assumed they either hadn’t run into or were plainly ignoring the flood of meteorological warnings on every media outlet, but even those most opposed to rules and advice should respond with humility to a magnificent ball of blazing plasma actively cooking them.
Health cannot be these people’s primary motivation. Perhaps one-upmanship, the opportunity to brag at cocktails bars about their crazy antics to friends who will undoubtedly wince with quiet pity at their lack of self-awareness and sub-standard decision making skills. Or maybe it’s something darker, like a New Year’s resolution hurriedly promised with no consideration of logic which now MUST BE OBEYED or a monkey’s paw style curse becomes activated. Or worst of all, ego, pride once again going before a fall, or a sudden collapse, in this case.
The one thing more powerful than ego is experience - a memory of heat stroke will tidily keep the feet out of the running shoes and up on the couch in front of an 8000 BTU window unit and two fans, like a rational person.
And for those experiences outside one’s own…experience, we have stories. History.
History makes us smarter.
I always wondered what the future would be like, and here we are.
Cars don’t fly quite yet, but they can talk and drive themselves. We can speak to and see the other side of the planet on hand held devices, talk to magical boxes that turn on the lights in our homes or tell us information, and we’re not wearing silver jumpsuits yet, but CROCS look like something I thought future people would wear.
And the internet, and social media in particular, seemed to me the very definition of “future”: everything in the world all the time.
I’m apparently not using it the right way because most of my online searches involve looking back in time, and not forward. Save the occasional movie trailer I am on a constant nostalgia run - old tv shows, people I knew, places I visited that aren’t there anymore.
I can’t find the future in The Future because it’s all filled up with the past - endless FaceBook and Instagram scrolls where my thumb is a time machine hurtling me through days, months, and years.
We are the first wave of humans on the planet who can do that, which also means we are the first wave of human beings that cannot forget yet don’t have to remember.
What did we wear, who was there, what color was my hair back then?
It’s all right there, digitally cataloged without need for digging through a shoebox of photos, a chronicle that would be disappointing to lose because it’s grounding to have evidence of being alive, of choices made, paths crossed. Our authentic experiences - our stories of where we’ve been, who we have been, define our individuality and help us understand who we now are.
History makes us smarter.
Classic console video games didn’t have “save” functions - instead players had to memorize the program screen by screen. When a mistake was made, the player had to start the entire game again, play up to that same point, and correct the mistake to move on. Memory became the game, gained try after try, and earned quarter by quarter.
It seems to me, at my somewhat elevated age, that wisdom is both an accumulation of knowledge and the perspective one is awarded when time repeats itself and we’re old enough to remember “the last time this sort of thing happened”. Recognition of circumstance hits us like cold water in the face and we jump, duck, dodge, and move based on our previous experiences.
We then tell these experiences to one another, and then to generations ahead, hoping to save them some time, or at least one quarter at the video game. We no longer have to depend on oral tradition or books to transmit wisdom as our dynamic online archive stores these cautionary tales.
If, for instance, I ran around the park during a heat advisory, future generations could instantly learn from my desiccated gasping video that this was a terrible idea, and they should get back on their couches immediately, monkey’s paw curse notwithstanding.
But we don’t control the digital archive; it is dependent on servers, electricity and satellites, none of which any of us own. A quick rea d of the software contracts we all skip past and agree to will reveal that we don’t even own any of the programs on our cellphones which capture and store all these stories. The value of books and oral tradition is that we can actually own a book. And our own voices. But even these are vulnerable to fire and, I guess, duct tape.
Stories are powerful, but we can’t learn from history if we can’t find it.
It is troubling when anyone wishes to destroy history, because our combined experience, good and bad, forms the foundation and identity that all civilizations are built upon. I treasure my photos of pets, videos of family, library of movies and music, but we all need to make certain to hold as tight to the world’s story as our own.
Our society is built from our history. As we sail into the future, our collective past propels us, but its trajectory is easily redirected - while time’s velocity is automatic, all navigation falls to us.
I don’t want to seem alarmist. I do not believe that forgetting the past will turn our world around completely.
Just about 100 degrees.
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