A History of the World in 100 Objects, a book by Neil MacGregor of the British Museum is opening up my sense of perspective about time and human accomplishment.

Today’s world is full of technology braggadocio, memes galore from influencers aplenty trying to persuade us all to go on a wild ride with them, and hubris in general about how great today’s accomplishments are.

However proud humans are today, this book that shows objects from antiquity can remind us that the human timeline is much longer than what we experience around us today. It’s also longer than the last 100 years, which is what is most often mentioned in brief references to the past that we hear from time to time. Today’s controversies are mostly recent. Today’s trends focus on the present and focus on personal experiences that each of us have.

We tend to focus on human failings in our stories about character development more than we consider humans striving to overcome their darker potentials. Our writing is often today about each person’s individual perspective which would be limited to a single lifetime. But there has been so much human experience beyond that.

Object number 28 in MacGregor’s book is the Basse-Yutz Flagons. Look them up online to get a clear view of them. These mostly bronze flasks are highly decorated with humorous adornments including 3 dogs and a duck. The duck appears to be swimming in the stream of decanted liquid as the flasks pour out their libations. The dogs are looking at the duck and it seems that they would chase it in the very next moment.

What is so amazing besides the beauty of these flasks is also the numerous skills that it took to make them, as well as the array of materials it took to assemble them and most especially their age. They were found in Lorraine, France and date from 450 BC. That’s about the same age as the Parthenon. And they were made by a Celtic people that were eventually conquered by the Romans. They are older than Christianity and older than Islam. Whatever troubles the world is touched by today never touched them in the particular way that current events may lead many of us today to feel worry or even to experience despair.

Since there are 3 dogs on these old flagons, I began to wonder how long our relationships with dogs have lasted. According to Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs, by Pat Shipman, humans have been domesticating dogs at least since 36,000 years ago. Amazing. That’s something we can trace that goes back in time much further than the 2,500 years of the Basse-Yutz Flagons.

Today’s perspectives are much influenced by media. But modern media is quite new. Whatever blessings or problems that modern media is causing our society have been over a much shorter timespan than the spans of time that I have just mentioned to you.

Whatever your concerns about politics, or economics, the politics and economics of today reflect only a short portion of the time that we humans have been experiencing life and creating societies. Whatever our perspectives about character development in fiction and fact and especially our tendency right now to concentrate on the darker aspects of the human heart, there have been and are other ways of portraying our human potential. Many stories have been told over the millenia of human life here on earth and some of those stories are hopeful. There’s a lot more to being human than just what we see in today’s media.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Opportunity and discovery can still surprise us and change us and redirect our path to something more encouraging or perhaps, more generous in acknowledging the human heart’s capacity to care about others, our ability to use our talents to create interesting objects, and our capacity to embrace the beauty of the natural world.