The Attraction Of The Other

 

Don't you wonder what is over that hill?  Way over there?

I didn’t have much to talk about yesterday so I will tell you what I was dreaming about. Dreaming as in non-scholarly pondering. 

I was thinking about the mechanisms for change among people in the past. Why didn’t they just stay put in their home villages, or their caves, or their floating reed houses or whatever? What made them leave? (This makes me think of Carl Sandburg’s very long poem, The People, Yes. https://www.amazon.com/People-Yes-Carl-Sandburg/dp/0156716658)

Why do people go out of their way to pick up new words and techniques and styles and foods, whole lands, etc?

Why do the races mix and remix?

I tried to imagine a world where nothing ever changed. Depends on where you start, doesn’t it? We could be living in grass huts or caves, if nothing ever changed!

Some of the usual good reasons for leaving home are climate got strange, food ran out, those other guys are trying to kill us, or hey those guys have a whole bunch of gold/money/spices/slaves/silk…let’s go get it!

But I was thinking about something else. I believe people are just attracted to the “Other.” I can imagine that as a mechanism for change all during human history. Maybe we are like certain birds. Things just catch our eye. Shiny things. Weird things. The girls in the next village! But mostly things that we see as better than what we have at home, or the way mom or dad always did it. Or, we just want more.

“The people have the element of surprise!” Carl Sandburg.