Even authors of fiction find a need to research for their work. As I have been writing for nearly two years, I have found many things I don’t know. I thought it would be easy to write about ancient times, imagining what life may have been like in those earliest years of our planet. So little is written about those days, most of it must be imagined, or so I thought.
Then I began to write and found I needed help. I had no idea how they used fire, or made unleavened bread, or tanned hides, or other things. I went to the web, searching. I found the answers to these and other questions. It’s wonderful to have the Internet to do research.
Did you ever have to use the card catalog or the magazine indexes? I did. Research only happened in libraries, with books and magazines. Never as easily as now, with computers and the Internet.
I found some amazing things, and some even went into my book.
Fire was used for heat and cooking, as you would expect. It hardened wooden tools and kept wild animals away. They say early people used fire to drive animals in the hunt, drive bees from the hive, and grasshoppers into cooking pits. Fires were used to clear away growth to find bulbs for food and brush to ease travel, and promote seed growth. Heat from the fire straightened or bent weapons as well as breaking stones for weapons.
What do you use fire for? Is there something you want to know more about? Leave me a message. I’ll share.
Category Archives: Lifelong Learning
How Long Do You Want to Live?
Life extends easily into the eighth decade and it is not unusual to hear of one living past 100. Over our history, life expectancy has varied dramatically. In the recent history of the last two or three hundred year, men and women were lucky to live to be 50 or 60.
Women especially struggled to survive through the births of their many children, facing unsanitary conditions and the resulting infections and fevers. Men didn’t fare much better, facing hunting accidents and war injuries with less than sophisticated medical knowledge and technology.
Even in the last century, accidents were fatal. Stories of men or women burning to death from accidents resulting from kerosene lamps are not unusual, nor are stories of death and injury caused by other accidents.
The question is: how long do you really want to live?
In the far past, it was common for people to live much more than 100 years. Abraham lived 365 years; Methuselah was the longest lived man on record, living 969 years. Adam and Eve lived well into their ninth century. That is much longer than I want to live!
Our lives are easier than theirs; we have all the benefits of electricity and electronics. Easy travel and rapid communication join with near effortless work in the home, food production, and other occupations, especially in comparison to lives just a century ago.
Our lives are more difficult in some ways. Consider the intensity of the challenges of hate, immorality, and evil that inundate us. It is difficult to get through a day without facing scantily clad people caught up in fierce expressions of lust, unless you stay in bed with the television off. Violence, hatred, pornography, abuse, immorality, and many more symptoms of a failing society abound, throughout the world.
Ancient days were not much better. None of the modern conveniences were available. All the work we depend on electricity to do was done manually, often by servants or slaves. Cleanliness would have been difficult. Medical knowledge was adequate, but certainly unable for its practitioners to cure or prevent infections and diseases.
Worse, battles between men were hand-to-hand, face your enemy, and slash him to bits before being destroyed. Women whose husbands and sons went to war could only hope and pray theirs would be the lucky ones to return without injury, if they returned at all.
Women who lived in those early could expect to be attacked and raped without protection of husbands, fathers, or their hired guards. Most men in nearly all ages believed in their right to have sexual relations with about any woman, while holding their wives and daughters to a stricter standard of sexual purity.
Violence and evil of every kind surrounded these people—much like it does today.
Eve struggled in her time in learning to survive a new, uninhabited world. Everything was new requiring thought and effort to overcome the problems, often failing and needing to try many different solutions before finding one that worked. She, too, faced the grief too many of her children who listened and succumbed to the voice of evil.
No, living for multiple centuries is not enticing. Seventy or eighty years is more than enough for any of us!
Keep Your Brain Healthy
Regardless of our station in our life, each of us will find greater happiness if we continue to learn. Even people who no longer work for a paycheck or salary have a need to continue to learn.
Studies have shown that when you exercise your brain, diseases that destroy your ability to remember are less able to affect you. If you have a family history of Alzheimer’s or Dementia, or if you’ve been involved in an accident that damaged your brain, even if only slightly, you will want to do everything you can to protect your brain.
If you don’t learn something new, you have wasted your day. You have wasted an opportunity to grow and learn and you missed out on keeping your brain active and healthy.
So much of our lives are spent in competition, we begin to believe even developing our brains should be competitive. In some professions, competition is important, as car racing.
“Even if you cannot reach those who are ahead of you, one is bound to keep always learning, and especially acquire experience in racing and credibility.” –Aryton Senna
Racing to catch up with another car, or to catch up to the next guy, or even to learn something new can benefit you and your brain. A study I read several years ago studied nuns who worked to stay mentally active. They lived well into their 90s, mentally alert and active.
So, what do you do to maintain a healthy brain? Keep it active. Play games that stimulate it. Read. Learn something new. Complete a word puzzle. Put together a jigsaw puzzle. Solve logic puzzles. Write a book. Tell your children and grandchildren the story of your life.
I chose to write books. I hope to have my first book ready before the end of June, telling the story of Eve. She spent much of her life learning.
What are you doing to keep your brain active?