Anchors: Their Value to Human Beings
Article by Herb Rubenstein
Introduction
I see every day many people holding on to things from their past (like Faulkner said in Requiem of A Nun). I know humans view these things, beliefs, memories from the past as “anchors.” This short writing explores the value and the distortions that anchors cause in the lives of humans.
I love anchors. We buy a piece of art and plan to have it for the rest of our lives and 40 years later, we love to see it. Anchors ground us. They give us a sense of place, a sense of home, and they contribute to our identity. (The - I am what I have - line of thinking). Family, even ancestors long deceased if we have a memory of them, represent anchors through their unconditional love, their teachings, their way of life, and their predictability over time in their relations with us. We are able to pick up a conversation with a person we have not seen in 40 years because we refer to the same anchors as the person we have not seen in 40 years, and we call this “rapport.”
However, anchors only work, and they are only anchors, when they are stuck, when they stop things from moving. Anchors let us breath a little easier, but they take our eyes off the ball - which is moving into the future quickly from the present.
Anchors play a critical role in making ships and shipping even possible, but they often give us little indication as to how to create our future or in what to the direction we should go. For many the Bible, or other ancient writings on religion represent anchors that do provide solid direction as decisions we should make or directions we should pursue. But the great Rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, states clearly that while these texts should be read and learned, they should be challenged by us thinking for ourselves today and should be cast aside when they are clearly not relevant or instructional for today. The Bible, Heschel says, should not be interpreted “literally” as instructions for today, because times and things have changed and humans change.
It is the job for humans to create the future for the humans, and all plants, animals, and the earth, who will be following us in time. Certainly, those humans who follow us will create, to the extent they can, their own future, but they will inherit what we leave them and what we leave them could be a significant set of constraints in addition to a considerable set of enablers.
Anchors are not reliable teachers for how to navigate the future because they were created to stop navigation in the first place and give the ship a safe place to rest. The way we must navigate the future is through our creative selves dedicated to a better future for all.
History as a Context, Not as a Dictator of Our Actions
I admit that our ancestors and their writings, the institutions they have created, their habits and life strategies, including religion, all have many great things to teach us. However, some of their ways and some of the ways people did things in the past, are not just irrelevant, they are antithetical to how we should live today. Anchors from our own past have a respected place, but many of them must be cast aside and not serve to hold us back from reaching our true potential and our ability to help others reach their potential. Yes, there is comfort in anchors, the sights, sounds, smells, of the past that light up our houses and give us a sense of peace and continuity. But, anchors rarely shed light on us to guide us as to how we should act in the future to maximize the potential for humans and the planet.
We are not here to live in the past nor are we here to try and change the past. Each such strategy is doomed to failure. We live in an ecosystem, and all ecosystems evolve, some slowly, some quickly. Ideally, on a good day, we keep up with the changes in our ecosystem, but on a great day, we lead our ecosystem to see a future that is brighter, more just, and more advanced than our ecosystem of yesterday and we behave in new ways that have only become appropriate in this newly evolved ecosystem.
Conclusion
So, as humans must learn how to “reorient” ourselves to changing circumstances that surround us, we humans must also “reorient” ourselves to our past, and our anchors. Thank these anchors for holding us together when we need to be held together, and freely cast aside our anchors when we ever want to go somewhere we have never been or even move from where we are today to wherever we want to go. Anchors impede movement, and movement is what creates a future better than what we have today, for ourselves, and for humanity.