At Large

It’s always interesting to run into a word or phrase that’s novel. It’s the “what does that mean?” syndrome. This can happen when reading a book and stumbling across a word that must make sense since it was written by a learned author, making note of it, then looking it up to see what we’ve been missing. It’s also a common experience when perusing the Internet – whiling away precious moments between being bombarded by cat videos and political broadsides.
It’s with understandable pride that we offer up today’s word:

Vergangenheitsbewältigung

Ah, those playful Germans. They have such a way with words. Rather than go to the trouble of creating a new word, it seems more efficient to simply cobble together several words and get the message across. Just in case … and we realize that this may be only a remote circumstance … the translation doesn’t simply leap off the page, that cumbersome word means “coping with the past.”

That can be a challenge.

As humans, we are gifted with the capacity to remember. Memories of childhood traumas are stored along with computer passwords, the names of pets, songs that haunt us at 3am, embarrassing moments from high school dances, punchlines of jokes, and directions to the hardware store. We remember world events and silly conversations from a family reunion 20 years in the past.

Since we remember the past – both good and bad – how do we cope with it? What’s the “secret sauce” that allows us to exert the full force of our Vergangenheitsbewältigung?

Sharing the burden

Well above our pay grade, we turn to the Salk Institute to discover that the human brain has the capacity to store one “petabyte” of memory. Petabyte – another word we didn’t understand. A petabyte is the equivalent of 2.5 million gigabytes. We’ll leave this tumble into the rabbit hole of computing to agree that a petabyte is a lot of information. A real lot.

So, burdened or blessed with the capacity to remember a great deal of information, most of it related to past experiences and knowledge gained over years of simply living, how does one cope with the burden of remembering – of coping – with the past?

The John Wayne School of Coping

Years ago, while visiting a western outfit store in Texas, we were stumbling around amidst aisles of tailored, snap-fastened shirts, impressive cowboy hats, and bolo ties. We were looking for a pair of boots. What dyed-in-the-wool eastern snob doesn’t need a pair of cowboy boots?

Casually propped up at the end of the boot aisle was a framed quote by one of America’s revered philosophers – John Wayne.

“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”

It seems to have taken ten words of English to capture what the Germans did with one, albeit lengthy word.

We’re hurtling toward mid-term elections. We’re trying to cope with vivid portrayals of frightening events that have been burned into our consciousness, to reside in memory for the years to come. We’re all trying to juggle the ethical guidelines created for us as children with the stark realities of life as we mature and age … and often grow more and more cynical. Memory has a frightening way of corroding innocence.

Under the layers of civil discourse, neighborly concern, and the simple repetitions of daily life, it’s quite possible that we’re simply frightened. The future is always an unknown, but if our mix of memories and apprehension turn facing that future by being, as John Wayne articulated, “scared to death,” the Vergangenheitsbewältigung of it all seems to be “saddle up anyway.”

Olympic send off

We overheard more than one coach at the recent Winter Olympics reach over to a young competitor about to throw themselves down an icy mountain and say, “You’ve got this.”

It may seem like cold comfort, but reliance on the human spirit encourages the voice of memory to affirm, “you’ve got this.”

Rock on. •