Mind Your Elders

My grandfather once told me that his great-grandfather, a man who must have been born around the year 1870, used to do a lot of walking. The Franco-Prussian war had just ended, and there wasn’t always a lot of work to go around in his tiny village.

Skilled at playing the violin, he offered to give lessons to folks in the city, which they gladly took him up on. There was only one problem: The city was 15 kilometers away, and cars wouldn’t even be invented until 1886, let alone mass-produced and affordable. So he walked. That’s an eight-hour round trip for perhaps an hour or two of paid employment. But back in the day, that’s how it worked.

My grandparents did a little less walking but still quite a lot. Grandma routinely walked three kilometers to catch the train to Kaiserslautern, a bigger city with more opportunities to work. She remembers ladies with egg baskets sitting next to her, carrying a hundred of them on a two-hour commute just to get to the market and sell their wares.

Grandma also walked to and from school, of course, and by the time she got home, it was often early afternoon. “Today we’re harvesting potatoes,” her father might have said, so off to the field everyone went. After a few hours of digging, it may have been grandma’s turn to feed the horses, and then, well, “Remember to do your homework!” That’s one of the few things that has stayed the same across her generation and mine: Every morning on the bus, someone was trying to finish their assignments.

I only walk to work when I want to. A 15-minute walk to WeWork used to be a planned and welcome luxury for me. Now, with an office in my apartment, I don’t have to leave the house at all. I might go on a stroll after lunch or meet a friend for some co-working, but by and large, my commute is zero minutes, zero kilometers. What a long way we’ve come — literally!

I’m not the perfect grandson by any means, but whenever I do spend time with my “elders,” I realize that much of my comfort ultimately goes back to their commitment. It is their steps that led to decent work, decent pay, and the decent life my parents enjoyed, their sacrifice in turn enabling my sister and I to live even more “decently.”

Of course, modern work also has its challenges and demands. Some might prefer a daily four-hour hike to endless Slack messages and brain-draining meetings. But good things happen when we mind our elders, and bad things when we don’t.

Every day, you can turn on the news and see some warlord or dictator somewhere, driving their country into ruin and suffering under the pretense of eternal glory. When you google their names, you might find the year they were born, and when you see the number, you may realize they appeared just in time to forget the lessons of their forebears. How could a child born into prosperity post-WWII possibly know about the dangers and pain of countries fighting? Often, they can’t, and that’s why some come to believe that it’s a perfectly sensible thing to try.

Whatever your ancestors can teach you, go out of your way to remember it. It may not even be a literal detour you’ll have to make, and it’ll likely save you plenty of walking down the road.

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This post was previously published on Niklas Göke’s blog

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