What Do You Have that Someone in the Past Would be Astounded By?
Last week, I started a series where I will share and answer some of the 100 prompts from our recently released “It is Well With My Soul” Gratitude Journal. If you missed the previous article, CLICK HERE. And be sure to get your own copy of the journal by CLICKING HERE.
This week, I want to answer another prompt:
What is something you take for granted that someone from a past century would be astounded by?
The short answer for most of us is probably nearly everything. From zippers to air conditioning to washing machines, some of our most mundane, everyday technologies put us in lives of luxury beyond the imagination of the most powerful pharaohs and emperors and kings of the past. I’d like to highlight a few specifics and while you read, sit back and think about what in your life is a modern convenience that a person from even just two hundred years ago would be absolutely floored to see.
Transportation
I love books about explorers and great expeditions. One of my favorites is a book called The River of Doubt written by Candice Millard. It chronicles Theodore Roosevelt’s somewhat ill-fated scientific expedition to explore a completely uncharted tributary of the Amazon River in Brazil. It is vividly written and so compelling. I highly recommend it. But a detail from it that stuck with me was that it took the expedition team over three months just to get from New York to the starting point of the river and the scientific portion of the expedition.
Traveling someplace in the past was such a lengthy undertaking and often so dangerous, people would say goodbye to loved ones and not know when or if they would ever see each other again. Now, we have not only discovered how to fly, and travel vast distances in impossibly short times, but flying is the safest mode of transportation that exists. My husband’s family lives nearly 3,000 miles away from us and we still see them multiple times a year.
My graduate program was low-residency and so we only had in-person class time for a few days out of every semester. My classmates flew in from Iceland, Hong Kong, Canada, and Australia just to learn and reconnect for a few days and then go back. That would have been absolutely unfathomable in most of the history of the world.
Transportation has just made the whole world smaller. This spring, in my itinerary home from Meridian’s Egypt tour, I was able to have a walk with my cousin in Oxford, England before breakfast and share dinner with my other cousin in Seattle, Washington on the same calendar day. It is absolutely wild that we live in a time where that is possible.
Access to Knowledge
There is a series of Victorian drawings that circulate around the internet now and then, that depict what they believed the year 2000 might look like. Some of the technologies likely could have been invented by now—like a mechanical robot hair cutting machine or giant umbrellas to protect cities from bad weather—but haven’t necessarily been the priority. They imagined some things we do have, like voice dictation and robot vacuums, and even imagined the flying car that is the classic futuristic detail we all still dream about.
But something they seemed unable to dream up (and who can blame them?) is the idea that in the future, so much of the population of the world would have a personal device with access to nearly all of human knowledge, at their fingertips. A crucial part of this access to knowledge for Latter-day Saints is our free and easy access to the scriptures on that same personal device. In the past, it might take a monastic scribe a year to make a single copy of the Bible, which made the finished product prohibitively expensive for nearly every person on earth. Not only that, most of them couldn’t read anyway. The beautiful, intricate stained-glass scenes you see in the old cathedrals in Europe were not just decorative. For many, that (and the sermons of their local clergyman) was their only access to the stories of the scriptures, because they would never be able to read them for themselves. Their study of the word of God was always filtered through the interpretation of another, in contrast to now, when we are encouraged to read and study the words for ourselves.
Today, anyone with a smartphone can have the entire standard works available at the touch of a button. And we can make unlimited digital copies accessible without a monastic scribe having to take even a single day to work on it.
Access to Motivation and Inspiration
And access to so much not only opens up knowledge, but possibility. My four-year-old came to support me in running a little 5k in August and was very disappointed to know he wasn’t going to be part of the race. I had told him no kids were running it, but got there and found I was mistaken. So, to make up for it, I registered the two of us for the next 5k that company was holding. We would run it together. We, unfortunately, did not get in the training time that I hoped, but knowing we could just walk it if needed, we showed up on race day, in costume, and ready to do our best.
I was very proud of him for taking every step of that route on his own two feet, but the initial excitement he had at the beginning definitely wore off, and by the end, he had gotten very cold and I had to coax him pretty hard to even take baby steps. Seeing the finish line gave him a last boost of energy so we ran the last bit, but we ultimately finished 481st and 482nd out of 485.
This week though, Benjamin asked me who the fastest person in the world is and I told him it was an Olympic runner named Usain Bolt. He wanted to know more, so, with only the touch of a button or two, I pulled up a couple of the absolutely mind-blowing videos of Usain Bolt’s record-breaking races and he was mesmerized. He watched Bolt pull ahead of the pack again and again and then asked if we could go outside so he could practice running. He ran back and forth on the front side walk for half an hour and then today, when it was time to go to preschool, he asked if he could run there.
It’s just in our neighborhood, so I drove alongside him while he ran. And he didn’t stop once. In our 5K, he never got more than about 40 feet of a sprint in before stopping. But now that he’d seen Usain Bolt running, he found it in himself to run all the way to preschool without a pause.
I certainly know that our access to examples of what others can do can have negative impact as well, but think of the access we have to examples that prove how much bigger we can dream than we imagined. The world has always been full of absolutely incredible stories, but now we have easy access to so many more of them than ever before and hopefully, we can take the examples and move forward bolder, braver, and more determined.
Healthcare
Now, anyone who has had a confusing medical issue arise in their life can get pretty disillusioned about the healthcare system pretty quickly. It’s true, we don’t have everything figured out and not all doctors are created equal in their discernment or their insightfulness. But we can shout for joy that we have our problems with medical care and not the problems faced by those in the past.
Take, for instance, my birthday buddy Harry Houdini. He was a renowned magician and escape artist whose mysterious death from a punch to the stomach astounded the public, when they had known him as a man who could escape the belly of a whale or be handcuffed upside down inside a water tank and find his way out unscathed. That punch to the stomach contributed to his death because of Houdini’s appendix. He was diagnosed a few days later with acute appendicitis and though it is not known whether the blows to his abdomen caused the appendicitis or damaged an already inflamed appendix, infection ultimate began to spread throughout his body.
A round of antibiotics would most likely have prevented the situation from being fatal. But antibiotics wouldn’t be invented for another 3 years.
I feel the weight of this story fairly personally because my appendix ruptured last year and I didn’t know that’s what had happened for over a week. Then, once a doctor went in for an emergency surgery, he couldn’t get the appendix out and so I had active appendicitis for about 8 months of last year that couldn’t be fully taken care of until scans showed that the inflammation had gone down enough to get access to the organ for removal.
But I was given many rounds of various antibiotics, monitored closely and basically lived my life exactly as if it wasn’t happening because of the medical advancements that have taken place between Houdini’s life and mine.
When I finally did go in for surgery, I didn’t have a swig of alcohol offered or the option to be tied to the bed, but fully conscious, like young Joseph Smith’s doctor for his leg surgery. No, I just dozed off while telling the nurse she had a fun pin on her nametag and woke up what felt like a second later and it was already done.
And because of laparoscopic technology, the surgery was done with tiny incisions and little cameras and I got to go home that same afternoon with three tiny dots on my belly as the only long-term effect. We are blessed beyond measure to live when we do.
Conclusion
I could make this article 50 pages long because of the number of things in our modern lives that have elevated our lifestyles beyond what the very wealthiest experienced in the past. I am beyond grateful, not only to live when I do, but especially grateful to all of the individuals throughout history that took chances and dealt with harsh criticism and pushed the envelope to innovate the things that are now just everyday realities.
From people who made such crucial discoveries as Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered the connection between doctors not washing their hands and maternal mortality rates and suffered a lifetime of persecution for it; to people who just made things a little easier like Rose Charters, who in the early 1930s tried to find a way to make an easy-to-prepare pie crust. She called her mix “crust-ease” or as the company she and her husband started now spells it, “Krusteaz.” We eat their pancakes most Sunday mornings.
Even if you buy your own copy of the “It is Well With My Soul” Gratitude Journal to write your own answer to this question in its own special place, I would love to hear what jumped to your mind when you read this prompt.
What is something you take for granted that someone from a past century would be astounded by?
Feel free to share in the comments below!
And if you read this far, enjoy 15% off your journal with the promo code GRATEFUL15.