The last three posts I’ve written are unpublished. Their titles are:
- Fading into the Background
- Being Unimportant
- Relearning History and Why Living Today Feels Wrong
I haven’t published them because they feel:
- a bit incoherent and not what I’m actually trying to say
- a bit out there and conspiracy theory-ish
- not like something I’m ready to publish on the internet
I’m clearly trying to make sense of something that doesn’t quite make sense to me. I’m giving up on coherency and am instead brain dumping.
Today’s unschooling activity was making a large timeline of the history of humans on my basement floor, all the way from 55,000 years ago to present. The plan is to pick a random spot on the timeline and learn about what we know about how humans lived at the time period. This is largely inspired by the book I’m currently reading: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I’m only a quarter of the way through but it’s huge: conceptually and physically. I didn’t want to share my thoughts about it until I was done, but at this pace it will take me another year and it’s already seeded so many thoughts in my mind that I need to talk about it at least a little bit.
The representation of history that was taught to me in school touched briefly about pre-history in the primary grades, then I remember Canadian history from middle school, and the world wars in high school. I cannot remember much else.
As a result, my mental map of the history of humanity has been heavily skewed to really only consider the last 500 years or so. The fact that humans have actually been around and existing for 55,000 years is fucking me up. The fact that the blip of modern history, the internet, capitalism, etc. makes up so much of our cultural reality is overwhelming when you finally take that step back to look at things from the 50,000 foot view.
I’m looking forward to learning more about pre-history and how us humans lived for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
I’m taking a break from Instagram for a month. It feels weird and unhealthy again, and I’m feeling like I don’t want to be so out there with my thoughts all the time. I was thinking about taking a break from this newsletter as well, here I am. Part of me (a growing part) wants to fade into the background and sever ties to this feeling of social responsibilities that aren’t actually connected to real people. Typing that makes me realize how weird it is that I feel like I have a social responsibility to communicate with not-real-people. To the internet blob of lurkers and creepers (present company excluded, obviously).
I have manufactured this weird responsibility to share my thoughts and life online because we’re doing something counter cultural and because it might inspire others. But if I stepped away tomorrow, nothing would actually happen. Nothing would explode. Friends that I’ve made would still be able to communicate with me.
I suspect that this manufactured responsibility is actually an internal validation issue. Not sure if I’m ready to dive any deeper into that thought at the moment.
I’ll end on a positive. Spring is finally here. I planted a new pear tree today to replace the one that didn’t make it from last year. We’re building a fence to keep the dogs in and I have so many plants to go along the fence line. Rhubarb, raspberries, wild ginger, haskaps, chokeberry. I’m excited to get new plants into the ground.
I have also learned from previous years and haven’t even PLANNED my garden yet. I chronically pre-plant way too early and the seedlings never make it. So this year I’m waiting and assuming last front will be early-mid June.
We’re also planning a poly tunnel greenhouse this year which will be amazing for our short growing season.
Things are happening.
Thanks for reading. <3