Looking For a Product or Packaging That No Longer Exists
In home-school social studies this month we are studying early colonization in North America. As a fun activity, we are doing quill writing. Unfortunately, we don’t keep quills in our house, nor ink for quill writing.
Luckily, calligraphy is still enough of an art that even Walmart had a quill pen with several different nibs all in one package. Still pricey enough that I only bought one. They can take turns! But ink? Not so much. Now, I ask you: how are you supposed to do quill writing without ink? There should be something right with the quill pens that says “quill ink” or something.
Photo credit:
The Morgan Library & Museum
http://www.themorgan.org/
In my head I was thinking “India ink”. I have no idea why. (I vaguely recall doing some project with India ink in 7th grade art class.) So I’m looking around for India ink and I can’t find any. I can’t even find a small bottle of “calligraphy ink”. What the heck? I went to a craft store and the only ink was a package of three different colors – about 15 ml each for 20.00. I didn’t really want to spend 20.00 for ink for one project. I’m pretty sure Jane Austen never paid that much! Plus, not one of the colors in the package was black.
So I started wondering what I could use in lieu of actual India ink. Then I realized I had some stamp pad refill ink that would probably do.
And then I realized I had been looking for the wrong thing. We have new technology. Look where we use ink today!
I also realized I had actually been looking for a small ceramic stoppered container like this:
Not a modern container like this:
I had to laugh at myself. When you’ve had enough past life regressions, the memories seem like they come from the same pool as your current life. You can get a little mixed up. I was definitely confused as to why I couldn’t find something so readily available in my Victorian life. Or my who-knows-which life that my conscious mind hasn’t remembered, but my sub-conscious or super-conscious knows very well.
The point at which I realized I was looking for the wrong thing was when I started to tell my kids what the package looked like that we needed. “It’s about this big, white, ceramic…” Wait a minute. We don’t have ceramic packaging for anything anymore. Too expensive. Plastic is the thing now. Hmmm… Ah HA! Wrong life!
So, yeah. Example one of why we don’t normally remember our past lives: so we don’t look for things that don’t exist anymore. 🙂
Have you ever done something similar and didn’t know why? Let me know!
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