What We Can Learn From A 6,000-Year-Old Pile Of Stones
By Eli Amdur
HAVELTE, The Netherlands – Quietly, they sit there. They have for some 6,000 years: ancient burial sites built of massive boulders, some as heavy as 25 tons, piled on each other in a recognizable pattern and a sensible order. They are the hunebedden, and there are 54 of them here in the sandy soil near the dunes of northern Netherlands, all within a radius of 18 miles. The stones, by the way, are from Scandinavia, brought to what are today the Dutch provinces of Drenthe and Groningen by the movement of glaciers over the course of 150,000 years.
The hunebedden are awesome and amazing. On general principle, I eschew the all-too-common usage of those two words because it seems, as I’ve written before, they are the only two adjectives anyone uses anymore. But you know what? A pepperoni pizza is not awesome, and the latest iPhone is no longer amazing. Sorry.
But the hunebedden are awesome and amazing. They’re an awesome architectural feat and an amazing accomplishment, given what we know about that time. Here’s one reason why.
You see, even though they’re a UNESCO World Heritage Site, if you don’t know they’re there, you’ll likely never find them. As CO2 emissions are toxic to stone, cars are kept at a distance, and you must walk or bike. Once there, you’ll find no garish displays, no theme parks with admission fees, no concession stands, no guides, no video kiosks, no members’ lounges. Certainly, no souvenir shops. Nothing. Not even wi-fi. Just the stones.
That’s exactly where awesome and amazing come in. Once you’re interested – and only when you are – you must spend time deliberately pondering these impressive yet structures, some of which are 60-80 feet long; walking around them – and considering the people, the Funnelbeakers, who built them nearly six millennia ago – before the pyramids or Stonehenge.
You soon not only find yourself deep in thought; you realize you’ve been in that state for a while. You realize, without anyone telling you, that these people had an orderly society, they had skills, they had aggregated knowledge, they built teams, they had jobs and assigned duties, they had laws and regulations, they had beliefs and rituals, they believed in an afterlife, and they had an idea about the future. (Relatively speaking, either they were more advanced, or we are less advanced, than we think. But that’s another conversation.)
There’s a point to all this. It was liberating and invigorating to focus – for as long as I wanted – on just one thing: those stones. We just don’t get that kind of opportunity too often, the way our lives and careers are structured and the way we take in the world. We spend more time working and commuting than on any other activity; we’re wired all over the place; we’re constantly expanding our on-line networks while they suck the life out of what little precious time we have let to think. And on cable news, we’re continuously distracted by four talking heads, two scrolls, three banners, and a bar graph – simultaneously – and, well, when’s the last time you pondered a pile of stones for an hour? We’ve gotten to where we have the attention span of a Jack Russell puppy!
In 1947, when Frank Aydelotte retired as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, the Board of Trustees asked a few of their leading faculty – most notably, Albert Einstein – whom they would recommend as Aydelotte’s successor. Einstein replied: “A quiet man who will let us just think.” Instead, they appointed the dynamic J. Robert Oppenheimer, but Einstein’s point was well made.
And that point is that we must make time to “just think,” to think about the very career and life challenges that exist because, ironically, we haven’t spent – and probably don’t anymore have – enough time to think about them in the first place. This becomes more critical every day as the world, the workplace and the political landscape become more frenetic at warp speed.
I’ve long believed this and have long tried (often insufficiently), but it took a 6000-year-old pile of stones – a truly awesome and amazing pile of stones – to remind me.
We all need our pile of stones.
