Haunting the Obscure

    There is a feeling that suggests that you have a certain range of choices available to you. This feeling can be taken away once time passes, and you are left in the dust, so to speak. This loss of options gives you new ones to choose from, but the pattern of lost chances happens again and again for those who decide not to follow on new paths.

   There is also a need to look at past events that have not been explored before. This need is satisfied once past events come to light to folk who have these feelings. There are events that are available to the seeker of a past that has not been explored before. Or at least, there have not been many people who have seen this option of haunting the obscure. That is, the past events that are not popular are the hunting ground of people with these feelings.

    If you spend time in the past that seemingly no one else has seen, you will become trapped in a certain mindset, which seeks isolation from the present that is thought to be harmful in some way. If you feel threatened by current events, you would seek refuge in the past to calm your fear of failing to live up to present events. So these obscure past events are a kind of sanctuary, where you can spend your time to get a better feel of how to measure up to current events.

   Now we have a dilemma because if you seek a safe shelter in the past, then this seeking is itself a present action, which suggests that the haunting that you seek after is a present one, rather than an action that is in line with the past. For example, if I want to escape a current battle that has been raging by reading up on how men in the past counted their grain, then that action is in line with the present, rather than the past.

   This outworking tells us that it is a fool's paradise to escape the present realities that we should deal with. As we study the past, we bring up new problems to deal with. To haunt the obscure is to say that there must be a better way than how we are currently handling our problems. So our looking back on how men have handled their problems can give us direction on how we should handle our difficulties now, but we cannot be under the spell of refuge from our current problems.