Feeling a Bit Lost? Here Are Some Tips for Getting in Touch with Your Roots
When you think about it, modern life – especially for city dollars – is pretty weird.
For millennia, different peoples in different environments fought against the elements to survive, wrote down their own stories, established their own cultural norms and traditions, and developed lifeways based on their experience with the world.
Until very recently, traditional cultures, myths, stories, and a sense of connection to your “roots” were the default state of being for just about all people, all over the world. But as larger and larger proportions of the population of any given country begin to migrate to cities, and as the assorted technologies and luxuries of the modern era become more sophisticated, many people find themselves feeling separated and detached from their roots.
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim, writing in the 19th century, talked about a social phenomenon he described as “anomie.” The idea of “anomie” is that people develop a sense of deep helplessness and nihilism, when the values and traditions of the society they’re a part of weaken and lose their power, and “new values” are either absent, or insufficient to fill the void.
Many of us these days feel that sense of “anomie” largely as a consequence of the awareness that we’ve lost touch with our roots, and are just going through the motions.
If this strikes a chord with you – if you’re feeling “lost” — here are some tips for getting in touch with your roots that might help to put things back into a healthy perspective.
Do what you can to track your family tree, and investigate the clues that are already present
Your bloodline is undoubtedly full of individuals and stories that are powerful and significant enough to fill bestselling novels, or blockbuster films. But for many of us, our knowledge of our family tree doesn’t extend beyond our grandparents at best.
Developing a sense of where your family has been, and how your family tree has developed over time, can be a brilliant way of gaining a sense of connection to the past, and the feeling of continuity with the people who came before you, and those will come after you.
Some people have it easier when it comes to tracking their family trees than others. If you are part of an ancient community, in a well-established country, where records have been kept for centuries, and haven’t been destroyed by war or social upheaval, your search is likely to be pretty straightforward.
On the other hand, for people who come from historically war-torn regions, or whose ancestors endured a lot of upheaval, the trail may go cold before too long. If and when this happens, it can be useful to investigate the clues that are already present and that don’t require an immense amount of detective work.
For example, if your surname is Duggan, you may find it useful to know that there are sites devoted to Duggans, and to exploring and investigating the roots of that family name (various districts of Ireland) and the ways in which the name spread throughout the world.
Of course, there are entire hobby communities dedicated to tracing family trees and tracking genealogy, complete with comprehensive website databases that can help you in your search, and may even uncover distant living relatives you had no clue about.
If at all possible, spend more time connecting with your parents, grandparents, and other relatives, and learn their stories
Your “roots” aren’t just those people in the mists of history who passed their genetic legacy on, down the ages, or just the people who pioneered certain cultural practices that you follow. In a much more immediate, tangible sense, your parents, grandparents, and other living relatives of yours are your “roots” and your “community.”
If you have living parents and grandparents, and have a connection with them, one of the best things you can do to help re-establish a sense of your place in the grand scheme of life, is to talk to them, listen carefully, and learn their stories.
There’s a strong line of continuity to be found in the relationships that exist between children and their parents. While the life experiences and cultural practices that your mom and dad have had, and were raised with, may not seem especially remarkable, consider the fact that they probably inherited at least some of that from their parents, who inherited from their parents, and so on.
When researchers look into the origins of certain well-worn traditions, it’s not unusual for them to find that particular behaviors have been passed down from parent to child for centuries, if not millennia, more or less unbroken.
Read history books, to try and get a handle on the stories that your family and community have been a part of
We live in an age of unprecedented access to information, and all of us are in a position where we can find documentaries, articles, and databases of books online, within only a few minutes of searching.
What’s more, we can order historical books to be delivered to our homes, often within a day or so of discovering them.
This is especially powerful and significant, because it’s worth keeping in mind that no matter what stories you learn from your relatives, and no matter what you can discover from your particular family tree, you will be missing out on a lot of the context and historical depth of what occurred to form the communities that you’re embedded in, and to inform the life experiences of your ancestors and relatives.
Reading history books can give you a great degree of insight into the past, and also the present. Because the past and the present are closely intertwined, and the lessons of the past are often immensely relevant to the present moment.
It’s no exaggeration to say that investigating the past can often help you to find your feet in the here and now, like just about nothing else can.