Sunday With Sisson | Mark's Daily Apple

Happy Sunday, everyone.

I’ve been devouring Conn Iggulden’s historical fiction series about Genghis Khan, his offspring, and their empires. Just finished the third book in the five book series. I won’t give any plot points away, but if you’re a student of Mongolian history you’ll know what happens. The books are pretty faithful to the history. There is embellishment and slight modifications and informed guesswork where no records exist, of course, but by and large it’s a faithful recounting of Genghis’ story.

There are many insights to take from the story of Genghis and his empire. The power of unity, of forming a nation from people who are very much alike but think themselves different. He was able to get these warring tribes—genetically and culturally very similar but at each other’s throats as long as they could remember—on the same page, and built one of the world’s greatest empires in doing so. I’m not saying he was a good guy, but he was an impressive one.

The see-saw action between mobility and sedentary life. These were true nomads, small bands of expert horsemen making a living by moving their herds with the grasses, hunting, eating milk and meat and whatever agricultural foods they traded for.

And yet they had a home, a homeland. Even though they moved freely within its boundaries (which were not strictly defined, by the way), they called it home. There was a deep connection to the land and to their freedom to stay mobile upon it.

They also had a warm home to come back to every night. They weren’t sleeping under the stars. They had “gers,” a sort of yurt they could pick up and load onto ox-driven carts and put down whenever they moved. It was a sturdy home, full of comforts, a place to raise your children and spend a quiet evening with your spouse. To me, if you take away all the raiding and warring, you’ve got your ideal nomadic living situation in the Mongols. The perfect blend of mobility and home. Now, I don’t know if you can take away the raiding and warring; that was probably a fundamental characteristic of the lifestyle that, if removed, would change the tenor of the entire situation. You can’t just pick and choose these things.

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There are many scenes where Genghis enters a walled city after conquering it and finds it stifling, both physically and psychologically. The sights, the smells, the tall buildings obstructing his view of the heavens. He enters a palace at one point and feels claustrophobic, starts to panic, imagines the stone roof collapsing under its own weight.

He wins mountains of gold and silver and jewels but finds them pointless. “This isn’t true wealth.” True wealth is horses, sheep, milk, cheese, meat, weapons, and warriors to wield them. He accumulates such ‘wealth” but does nothing with it, can’t. None of his countrymen have any use for it. No one he cares about values it. What more is there to say? Imagine that feeling!

Some of us feel the same way, don’t we? We’ve grown up in homes with solid ceilings and walls. We’ve spent our childhoods in desks unable to get up to use the bathroom unless we ask for permission. We go to jobs inside walled, ceilinged structures and move only our eyeballs and fingertips to make numbers and words move on a screen. It’s all a bit weird, isn’t it? It’s common—we’re all used to it—but is it normal? Is it the human norm? Aren’t we all chafing at the bit?

This is the world we live in, of course. We can’t escape it. But we can keep our edge. We can stay a little wild, keep moving, remain curious and interested and engaged. We can have the family and the stability and even the job inside a building with four walls and a ceiling without sacrificing who we are and what we yearn to do.

Have you ever read the Khan series or studied the Mongols? How does it make you feel? Let me know in the comment section of New and Noteworthy.

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