Wednesday, July 8, 2020

History & Life Lessons


We traveled a lot when I was a kid. My dad loved to see new places. We lived in France, and on weekends, we would visit different cities in Europe. We would stand in front of some monument, and he would start telling me the story of how that monument came to be. Only I think he forgot that I was just a kid. He would use words I didn't quite understand and his stories had too many characters. My eight-year-old brain couldn't process all the information, and none of it made sense to me. All he really accomplished with his history lessons was make me feel history was complicated and alien. I grew up detesting history and everything related to it.

For the longest time, history was my least favorite subject in school, and I avoided history books – and anything that involved history in any way – at all cost. Then I went to university when I was in my late teens and studied French literature. You can't really study literature without knowing some history, so I forced myself to read the history books I despised and even managed to get good grades, but I still secretly disliked history.

About a decade ago, I found the complete set of The Story of Civilization by Will Durant at a library bookstore where used books are sold at affordable prices. I decided to get the books and give them a try. I ended up reading all of them. If you're not familiar with the series, it's over ten thousand pages.

Since I joined the writing community in March 2019, I've met people who write different genres. I noticed I was still staying away from history, and not just nonfiction. Even historical fiction was one of my least favorite genres. As I interacted with various writers, I met Marian L Thorpe, someone whose tweets I enjoy reading and who writes historical fiction, a genre I would normally avoid. However, a short while ago, because I admire her, I read a sample of one of her books, OraiƔphon, and found myself hooked. My interest in historical fiction surprised me. I'd always stayed away from such books.


Around the same time, I was reading a book by Eckhart Tolle, and I decided to trace back one of his references to its origin. I looked up the book and tried to find it in the library catalog, hoping to borrow it. The only resource my search got me was a DVD titled Life Lessons from the Great Books. When I picked it up at the library (I'm taking the opportunity here to thank the librarians who tirelessly work behind the scenes to provide this huge service even though the libraries are officially closed and only “curbside pickup” is available.), I noticed it's a collection of six DVDs, each containing six lectures by the late Professor J. Rufus Fears from University of Oklahoma. If you don't know him, google him. You'll find he has lots of talks on YouTube. He's a historian and an excellent storyteller. I watched all thirty-six of his lectures and then watched them all again, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Sometimes our beliefs and opinions are based on how things were initially presented to us. It doesn't hurt us to keep an open mind and give ourselves the opportunity to look at things again and maybe re-evaluate them from a different perspective. I know for a fact that if I had stayed stubborn in my opinion of history and hadn't kept an open mind, I would have never read The Story of Civilization or the sample of that historical fiction and I would have turned that DVD off as soon as I realized it would be lectures on history. I'm glad I got over my initial beliefs. In the end, I'm the one who benefits from knowing everything I gave myself permission to learn.

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