HISTORY IN THE NOW

PODCAST

(1)

History-in-the-Now

by PAUL ZANAZANIAN

History-in-the-now is a virtual forum dedicated to sharing information, exchanging ideas, and creating new understandings of what history is and how we use it in our everyday lives.

History-in-the-now is devoted to examining history as a source of knowledge and how it functions to provide us with meaning and direction. As individuals and as members of different communities, history tells us who we are, how to act in various life contexts, and what our place in larger society is. History permits us to think about big picture ideas, about what works and what doesn’t, about how we can make things better for tomorrow, and about how we fit into the larger scheme of things beyond our very own existence. In many ways, history offers structure and order to our lives, and to the world around us.

While what history does is quite clear, I believe it really comes alive and calls out to us when unexpected life happenings come knocking on our doors and disrupt the regular flow of our daily routines. To address these challenges, we use history — personal history, inherited history, group history — to make sense of them, to better understand what is taking place, to see how we can adapt, to perhaps make changes to our lives to overcome our losses, and to heal whatever pain that arises. In this way, history provides some sort of balance to who we are. We use it to feel complete and fulfilled, and to ultimately maintain our sense of dignity and integrity as persons.

“We use history to feel complete and fulfilled, and to ultimately maintain our sense of dignity and integrity as persons.”

This quest to feel balanced — fulfilled, complete, dignified, and integral —, I believe, is a fundamental characteristic of what it means to be human. If we were to recognize this characteristic as an inherent right — a characteristic that we and others have a legitimate claim to —, we can perhaps come to better understand people who are different from us. We may be drawn to learn from their many experiences to make sense of our lives and of what it means to be balanced and happy. In feeling the joy of this expansion, we may even want to see this growth of self-knowledge in others, so that we expand even further through our many interactions. History exercised in this manner, I believe, can help us improve the world. It can offer balance and happiness to us and everyone around us.

History-in-the-now seeks to explore these processes and possibilities in greater depth and invites you to join in on the fun. Together, we will investigate how history works to create meaning, how we use it to adapt to unexpected life happenings, to make social change when needed, and how our very own thinking and lived and inherited experiences fit into these everyday uses.

Why antique toy robots?

I use images of antique toy robots to explain what history-in-the-now means to me. History-in-the-now holds a non-linear understanding of time, where past, present, and future are not separate and different from each other, but where all three are intertwined in the now moment of our awareness of the world. History-in-the-now seeks to reflect on how the present is always already the past of the future, where the future becomes one with the past and the past becomes one with the future.

When people are engaged in a fun activity, they often mention how time stands still and how they are happy.

“Both the future and the past become one in the present and don’t seem to move. Imagine playing with a toy robot. Time stands still because you are content.”

As the robot represents the future, playing with an antique one — with a future-oriented toy, but from the past — time stands still and past-present-and-future in your happiness become intertwined. Images of toy antique robots, I believe, capture this feeling of joy in time standing still. They symbolize the idea of balance and happiness in the now moment of awareness. When time stands still, we are alive and always present, never ending, just always already present and alive, with a feeling of immortality.

With this starting point, we can engage in the kinds of sharing, exchanging, and meaning making I hope to create. In viewing people in their everyday lives seeking to play with antique toy robots and wishing for time to stand still, we can perhaps come to recognize and appreciate their legitimate right to seek balance and happiness in their lives. Acknowledging this characteristic, I believe, can work wonders to help make our world a better place. In playing with antique toy robots, metaphorically speaking, we can all feel complete and fulfilled in the now, and by recognizing our right to this joy, we can moreover maintain our sense of dignity and integrity as humans.

LEGEND

EXPERIENCE — refers to the space of lived, gained, and inherited experiences from prior times and that are ongoing.

EXPECTATIONS — refer to the horizon of what is to come in terms of hopes, dreams, and anticipations.

CULTURAL MEMORY — refers to the overall collection, evolution, and adaptation of the knowledge and practices that different peoples possess, develop, and ultimately employ to guide their thinking and interactions in the world.

HISTORICAL CULTURE — located within the confines of cultural memory — relates to the overall collection, evolution, and adaptation of the necessary pre-given significations and conceptual resources that enable individuals to interpret time’s passage and to account for any changes and contingencies that arise.

THE NOW — refers to the time-space zone where the sense-making process takes place from which our historical consciousness of time’s flow emerges.

Why History-in-the-Now?

I have always been curious about how people think, feel, and use history for living their lives. My main interest concerns our understanding of time, its flow, and our movement in it. What triggered this thinking was my existential fascination during my youth with the idea of our eventual disappearance from the world, which I still believe to be totally absurd, and which continues to astonish me.

Many of us often try to live our lives to the fullest, doing our very best to survive, to provide love, care, and support to the ones closest to us, even to strangers, and then, at the snap of a finger, our presence simply ceases and is gone forever. We end up becoming forgotten, some unknown face, from some faraway and imaginary place.

“We end up becoming forgotten, some unknown face, from some faraway and imaginary place.”

As I reflected on the absurdity of our inevitable end, my curiosity grew further, and my attention eventually came to focus on better understanding how we actually engage with life in the here and now. In countering the absurdity of our disappearance, I ultimately became enthralled with the notion of time and our movement in it — which I call history —, wanting to know more about our process of being, about our sense-making and ability to act upon the world, and our capacity to make change and to improve the quality of our daily lives.

My inquiry into history-in-the-now is my response to these queries and concerns about life and death, and about our fundamental humanity. To find answers, my aim is to deeply reflect on history’s role and function in our lives, all the while knowing that many mysteries and questions will remain. Through focusing on the processes of our sense-making, the hope is to help raise awareness of how we produce historical knowledge and use it to navigate our worlds. In recognizing that we do not always have the answers, the hope is to moreover help people acknowledge the fallibility of what we know, and to thus be cognizant of the need to always question and seek more answers.

The goal is to develop a critical and reflexive mindset where we consistently problematize the knowledge we possess and the processes by which we gain it. Using what we know with care and nuance, I believe, can better place us to successfully adapt to the changes and demands of our evolving lives, of the societies we belong to. With this mindset, by way of an open heart and soul, the hope is to eventually help reclaim our shared humanity.

VISION

My vision with history-in-the-now is to help restore and celebrate our shared quest for integrity, dignity, and completeness as humans. Better grasping history’s role in our lives — how we use it to create knowledge and to navigate our worlds — can highlight our collective humanity and can optimistically contribute to appreciating and benefitting from our common experiences as people who dream, love, and seek stability and happiness in our lives.

(2)

(3)

The key, I believe, is to deeply listen with our hearts — both critically and reflexively — to what others have to say. This involves recognizing the gaps in our own knowledge and asking the right questions to better comprehend who we are and how our thinking works. Through this, we can engage in dialogue and seek to understand people whose ideas and approaches to the world differ from ours. New opportunities for understanding history and employing it to bring people together can hopefully emerge as a result.

¹ Atomic Robot Man might have been designed before World War II, but it was released shortly thereafter.

² The Smoking Spaceman was made in Japan in 1962 for U.S. toy maker Marx.

³ This robot carries a lantern, for which he’s named, even though a robot would not need such a primitive light source to see.

This robot carries a lantern, for which he’s named, even though a robot would not need such a primitive light source to see.

The Smoking Spaceman was made in Japan in 1962 for U.S. toy maker Marx.