Some time ago, as I was doing yet another load of laundry, I began to feel the futility of what I was doing. After all, I thought, I'm just going to have to do all of this laundry again next week and the week after that ad infinitum! Then it also occurred to me that most things in life are that way. We eat, and in a few hours we have to eat again. We pay the bills, and next month, without fail, we have to pay them again. Then, I thought to myself, the Maya were right.
The Maya were an ancient people living in a remote place; but apparently they had more on the ball than anyone thought, up until now. One of the evidences of their advanced culture was their calendar. It wasn't like ours, which runs in a straight line from a past point unknown, to a future point unknown, with a brief tipping point in history which they call the year 1. Having grown up with this system we find it normal and natural. But after my “Laundry Moment” I was beginning to wonder.
The strange thing about the Maya calendar is that it runs not in a line from past to present to future, but in concentric circles. Simply put, they understood something about life that wise people have always known and that I am just beginning to understand; which is, that life is cyclical, history repeats itself and human nature is the same today as it was five thousand years ago and will be in five thousand more years.
This does not mean that every year is exactly the same , but it does mean that certain principles apply on a regular, like laundry, for instance. If my daughter got married today and started a family, I could guarantee that she would have to do a certain amount of laundry in her lifetime, and the more children she had, the more laundry. This doesn't take a genius to understand. So the Maya, with resources available to them which, perhaps, we are unfamiliar with, were able to come up with a calendar that not only maps out the days, but also takes into account the movement of stars, planets and solar systems, mirroring the past and projecting it into the future.
I have thought, many times, that people are pretty forgetful, as far as even recent history is concerned. In fact, I was reading a biography of one of the leaders of this country some seventy years ago and I had to laugh when I read a page out of his campaign speeches that sounded so much like one I heard just a short time ago that I wondered if they didn't just change the names and dates and copy it word for word. The sad part about it is that neither of those leaders was telling the truth, but were merely spouting rhetoric in order to get elected. And it worked, both times.
I think history repeats itself, partly because people don't know what happened in previous generations and partly because human nature never changes. For that reason, both history and life look like a merry-go-round. People live, eat, wear clothes, do laundry, have children, and die; then their children do the same. Groups of people live, grow, become wealthy, become complacent, get captured by someone else, rise up in rebellion, take back their freedom and begin to live again. So, like the Maya calendar, life isn't just a circle, it is a circle within a circle within a circle. Every part of our lives is cyclical and the Maya must have had some idea of this in order to create their calendar.
After spending time sick in bed, unable to do any laundry, I realized how important it was to me and my sense of well-being. Every time I finished the job, I felt more alive and more capable. Similarly, there are challenges facing us as groups of people that seem daunting or impossible. The only thing to do is to rise to the challenge and do the job at hand. If I decided today that laundry was too difficult, I would soon find myself buried in laundry and feeling terrible about myself. Ostriches bury their heads while the enemy loots their nest. People just forget history and act surprised when it repeats itself. And the merry-go-round keeps going.
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