Longevity everywhere around me
A few months ago when I wrote about the long-now I was focused on the importance of having a long-term perspective, and how longer time horizons help us see things differently. One thing that attracted my attention was institutions that have been around for a long time: A 500 year old brewery. A thousand year old ryokan. While I still find those topics interesting, I’ve started to find this lens less useful since makes it seem like longevity is scarce when in reality, longevity is everywhere around us - it just requires us to pay attention.
Every day and moment we are living in an enmeshed web of cultures and technologies that stem from hundreds and thousands of years of co-development and interlinking.
Everything we touch can trace its roots to thousands and millions of people - people alive and long passed. This keyboard. My genes. The water I drink. A glass of milk. It’s all interconnected and when I pull the threads, it just keeps going…
Take this pot of tea. Pottery is a technology that goes back 9,000 years! Nine thousand! We humans have developed, shared and expanded that technology since then and continued that tradition into my hands today. This pot also isn’t clay - it’s metal. That required countless inventions over thousands of years in mining, metallurgy, manufacturing, and art.
If we then shift to the tea we go back further. This tea’s ancestors far predate humanity - angiosperms evolved around 125 million years ago; the concept of flowering plants was completely revolutionary! This tea is a derivative of that long gone little plant. It’s line of DNA continues into this cup. To create this particular type of tea, at some point our human societies had to be stable enough to start iterating tea varietals. Growing wealth, stable governments and stable infrastructure allowed plantations to develop, we needed innovations in transportation to move the produce, trade helped spread the custom of tea, and so on… This one cup of tea is longevity incarnate.
My friend Gordon Brander writes: “Everything around me was someone's lifework.”
It’s easy to lose ourselves in the recent past. The time we’re living in feels so disconnected and unique. But it’s not disconnected - every day is an extension of the day before. And the day before that. And the year and the decades preceding. The wheel doesn’t stop turning. Each and every one of us is an extension of all the countless generations before us.
Here is a poem by Xie Lingyun from around 400 A.D. in China. I think it’s beautiful but I also love it because the images it captures are indistinguishable from today:
Written on the Lake on my Way Back to the Retreat at Stone Cliff
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Between dusk and dawn the weather is constantly changing,
Bathing mountain and lake alike in radiant sunlight.
This radiant sunlight filled me with such joy,
That lost in delight I quite forgot to go home.
When I left my valley the day had scarcely broken,
When I stepped into my boat the light was growing dim.
Forest and gorge were veiled in sombre colours,
The sunset clouds mingled with evening haze.
Gay panoply of water-chestnut, lotus,
Rushes and cattails growing side by side,
I swept them aside with my hands as I hastened southwards.
How glad I was to reach my house in the east!
Once the mind stops striving the world loses importance,
Once the heart is content it does not swerve from the truth.
I send these words to those who would nurture their lives:
Try using this Method if you want the Truth.
This was written 1,600 years ago…
Appreciate that you are another link in the long chain that predates you. Everything around you is a miracle.
