Our existence, from our physical birth till our physical death, is finite. It has a beginning and an end. With this limited time, we constantly make decisions about what we choose to learn and remember. We may hear about, say, the Civil Rights Movement during our P-12 education, and remember a few words: “Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream.” Once we graduate, that may be all we remember. That may be all we were taught. This pattern may continue if we go to college because in a survey course all the material gets condensed. We may learn more about the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but we still won’t get the full picture. We will only get a few grains of sand in the hourglass of time.

Diving deeper into the waters, past the surface level information and facts we learn during our “formal” education in the classroom requires work and commitment. It requires a curiosity and desire to continue learning and engaging with knowledge. Do we stop learning once we end our “formal” education? Does learning merely take place in an educational setting? The answer to both of these questions is, “No.” Lillian Smith, writing to Wesley Hartley and his English students, states “that education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience and has only a little to do with school or college.” To sound the depths beneath the surface, one must have the desire to dive deeper and deeper below the waves, letting the vastness of knowledge ebb and flow around them.

Smith continues by telling Hartley and his students, “What really matters is this: learning; wanting to learn; yearning to know; craving knowledge; eternally scrabbling through the past to find out what interesting minds have thought; eternal exploring the present to see what interesting minds are now thinking.” Learning involves work. It involves moving backwards and forwards simultaneously, taking knowledge from the past and applying it in the present to impact the future. It involves knowing what came before and how the past, as Frederick Douglass put it, “we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” When we flatten events and people and gloss over others, we diminish the power of the past and what we can learn from it.

Pauli Murray knew this. Patricia Bell-Scott opens her book The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice with an excerpt from a letter that Murray wrote to Bell-Scott in 1983. Murray wrote to Bell-Scott, who had extended an invitation to Murray to be a consulting editor for SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, that in order to understand the totality of existence we must undertake our own quests for knowledge. Murray wrote, “You need to know some of the veterans of the battle whose shoulders you now stand.” Murray didn’t mean Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr. She meant Ruth Powell, Caroline Ware, Corienne Robinson Morrow, and countless others who both built upon those who came before them and laid another foundational level, strengthening the building, for those who came after them.

We do not learn about these women, Murray, or Smith in the “formal” education. We hit the high notes, soaring above the groundwork. We see the formulated narratives that move quickly, in a condensed manner, to provide the most surface level information as quick as possible before our attention level switches to our next interest. We get in, take the basics, and get out, not realizing the paths it took to get to the high notes or where the song goes after the event “concludes.” We leave it. Go on to our responsibilities, leaving ourselves no time to learn more, to dive beneath the surface, deeper and deeper into the ocean. We pick up the three grains of sand as the rest continue to stream, rapidly, through the hourglass, lost amongst the multitude.

That multitude, those countless grains of sand, taken separately amount to miniscule particles of matter that we have to strain to see. When we put them under a microscope, we see the surface, the indentions, the beauty of that small grain. It becomes our focus. However, when we put those grains back with the rest, we see a different perspective. They come together to form a larger entity, a sand dune, a beach, or more. Each grain makes up the whole, forming a large picture of history and the interactions between individuals. We could pull each grain out, examine it and comment on it, but while that may be useful to understand that grain of sand it fails to help us see the bigger picture, the entirety of the past. When we choose the grain over the multitude we flatten it, becoming blind to so much more.

In order for the past to inform the present and the future, we must take it in its entirety. We can’t boil it down to singular grains of sand. We must be proactive in forming the whole, taking those singular grains of sand and putting them together, forming a picture of the whole not the singular. This requires work and time. It requires a desire to learn. It requires us to think about the gaps we don’t know, the things we didn’t learn in our “formal” education. It requires us to become, in essence, auto-didacts, following our interests and pursuits.

This doesn’t just apply to history. It applies to anything. Each of us are individual grains of sand, sliding through the hourglass to the bottom where we will join the rest of history, becoming part of the accumulated sand of the past. Our stories make up the entirety. Our stories are important. Smith concludes her memoir Killers of the Dream by pointing out that the book was her story, a story amidst a multitude, but it also was part of the multitude. She writes, “And now, I must break off this story that has not ended; a story that is, after all, only one small fragment, hardly more than a page in a book where is being recorded what happened to men and women and children of the earth during the Great Ordeal when finally they separated themselves a little way from nature and assumed the burden of their evolution.”

To move forward, one must always look backwards, drawing upon who and what has come before in order to pave the way to the future. When we stop doing this, we die. We must always ask question, always be opening to learning, always seek answers, because when we stop doing these things, as Smith tells Hartley and his students, “it is time to die: time to crawl up into that small room and pull the cover over you.”

What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.