who invented oatmeal?

all the world is a stage. and all we men and women merely players...

nobody has all the answers. no matter how wise or how far-sighted, nobody can see the whole entire universe at once. everyone gets to extemporaneously come up with their own lines, their own life. the things they do and the words they say aren't usually practiced, premeditated things. the patterns they follow and the plans they lay out are things they have struggled to find and etch out for themselves, not blueprints they picked up at a discount shop somewhere.

because we are all separate individuals with our own points of view this is the way it works. as much as I may learn from watching my parents or classmates or neighbors, I won't figure it out completely until I'm in there, doing it. as hard as I study french or italian, I can't be truly fluent until I spend some time in france or italy. as much as my technical writing professors may have prepared me for the professional world, it's me that has to find my own way of making a living out here.

and yet... we do the things we do for some reason... we learn the things we learn and value the things we value because of something... are those reasons within ourselves, or do we acquire them from somewhere else?

i suppose it seems obvious that a thing must have a context in which to give and take. be stimulated and also stimulate. to affect change. to be changed. the balance of power is so... delicate.

I always wonder about things as they very first happened. oatmeal is just oatmeal today. nothing special. but who was the very first person to take this plant and figure out you could make cereal out of it? who decided it tasted okay? whoever it was probably didn't have somebody pointing the way, explaining just how long it needed to cook, telling him how much nicer it would taste with bananas in it. how did he know?

more relevant to my life perhaps is the question of what new things we are figuring out today. we don't have to reinvent oatmeal, but there are always more stuff that nobody has ever done before. cures for cancer to discover. stars to name. people to talk to. books to read. books to write. I wonder if we should feel sorry for the man who invented oatmeal, since he did not get to learn how to ride a bike or see the great wall of china or become a great surgeon. but I don't think we should. he got to invent oatmeal, and to grow things in the earth and to feed his family and just because he (or she, I suppose, or anyone) didn't know everything or go everywhere, he acted his part.

what the point of oatmeal or astronomy or curing cancer might be are all questions for another day. for now, I will refer you to the food timeline, which puts the cultivation of oats at around 1000 BC. you can read about the history on this page. there is even a recipe for oatmeal cookies.