I may be a little weird, but I love learning about how things began and why. That’s why my math teachers were always mad at me. I’d ask them when I’d use this advanced math outside of the classroom and they never really had any good answers. Don’t get me wrong, I love math, but do I really need to know how to calculate the distance a shadow casts at high noon?
Anyway, I believe that when we learn about the past, we can learn about ourselves and our future. I treat the past as something that exists apart from me and yet still a part of me. When we reach back and touch history, we leave knowing something more about ourselves.
One of the things I have done in the past is to sit and look at really old trees. I find myself wondering about all the things that old tree “saw” during its lifetime. There’s a large old tree on my street that I believe has been here for a LONG time. That means it was here when Florida was a swamp, when the Seminoles roamed the state, and maybe even when Ponce de Leon was in search of the fountain of youth.
I find something very inspiring about being able to touch that tree and almost connect to the other people that also saw and touched that same tree, even if it was hundreds of years ago. That’s why I also like going to musuems and to take those tours of historical homes. It’s a brief moment to reconnect with the past. A thought that has always intrigued me is that our species has been around for a long time. That means that our roots trace back for millenia at least. How crazy is that, when you really think about it?
We are the result of at least several thousands of years of breeding, survival, struggle, and success. Doesn’t that kind of make it easier to think a little more highly of yourself?
I actually said all that talk about the past to get to this point. Today I found the oldest site on the internet. That’s right, the very first WWW page ever made. It was created in 1990 and I believe put online in 1991. I’m not sure how involved Al Gore was (snicker) but it’s definitely something you should check out.
Here is the link: http://info.cern.ch/
To see how the website looked back then, click here.
Reconnect to those roots!
Now, I know this isn’t my normal topic of discussion, but I just felt like sharing something a little different. I am working hard on the podcasts now, so be getting ready!
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