We will always be physically stuck in the future, in a time disguised as now. As much as we reminisce in the past and long for moments that once were, our understanding of time makes us believe in the concepts of simple past, present and future. As people, we often look to the past and recall regrets, shameful moments of our personal histories that plague our minds into oblivion, especially in the strangest and most obscene of times. We learn about time in school and devote our class time to discovering the actions of the past and see how far we’ve come since the moments laid out before us in textbooks. This is your past, but most importantly, this is our past. The lives and times of humans before us, etched, written, spoken of, for decades or centuries after their occurrence. These are the stories we tell, and we can never escape them.

We remind ourselves of these pasts daily. They line our streets, highlight our cities, create our timelines and take up the most space on our phones. But the truest recalling and the best understanding of the human past is not found in these places or through these stories. History, like the present, is best understood through the grasping of context, understanding the ins and outs of the moments we live in. We search for the past as we look to the future. Going to a place of learning is easy, it is the understanding which becomes complicated.

You go anyway.

Walking into the place, a spring in your step. It’s summer again in Vienna. Its history pounded deep into the roads and sidewalks, the city hides none of its history from the eyes of the public. Memorials, shrines, tours, artwork all sprinkle themselves across her grounds, serving as constant reminders of the events of the past, and how one never can escape them.

This place, in particular, holds more value than any newly instituted building or statue ever could. Sneaker-clad shoes rest themselves for but a moment on the open, round foyer that is the grand entrance of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (art history museum), eyes scanning the vast, open concept, rounded ceiling area for something, anything, to read. Statues frozen in time for millennia. The collection dates itself back to the 1640s, the plaque says. Out of every museum in Vienna, Austria, or hell, any museum in all of Europe, you decided to come to this one, the old museum of Vienna. Or were you called to it?

The ceramic, cold floor holds the ancient statues in their places. The sunlight cascades down from the windows above, blinding when looked at, often causing people to wonder what the museum looks like when it rains. Walking left, the ceramic changes to designed marble, the room multiplies in size with large, gothic arches that hold up the cieling, black with hits of what looks like cascading gold. Even more impressive than the foyers, the walls are intricately designed with cherubs holding golden vines across doorways. The mastery takes you aback, but this area is merely a seating area which others have claimed their own. Making the way through, still looking up at the moulding along arches that lead to other rooms, the one on the right has things in cases. Interesting.

That is what museums are for, of course. This feature highlights Lutheran-era artifacts. Printed books, tools, weapons and busts of figures, each with a date that seems so long ago. The Protestant reform of the 1500s which developed the church of Luther. Moving on dark wooden floors with more captivating, detailed ceilings.  Babylonian artifacts, artwork, romanticized stories, all from 4000 years ago. Battles and portraits line darker rooms with cozier sofas, describing events that have now become myth and legend. Things that are officially documented as “the past”. Far too distant for any clear transcript of what happened, deemed as “things to learn from” or, in the case of the Holocaust exhibit with black and white photographs and personal accounts, “things that will never happen again”.

That’s what we are to believe, what we have been tricked into thinking. History has become fictionalized. Artifacts are to be marvelled at, but never understood. Fossils of cultures henceforth past are prizes to be discovered, as objects to be taken. History was never alive, as much as museums would like to change that. We condense peoples lives into sentences, hundreds of years of history taking minutes to explain.

And we wonder why understanding the past is so complex.

Walking through a museum, we are filled with awe, excitement, wonder. We have history boxed into buildings, stamped on plaques, never really understanding why events occurred, how people mobilized and who was involved in creating these moments we call history. This is what makes the past so fascinating. We tell ourselves that things from the past like wars, slavery, castles and myths are aspects of the past, things that no longer exist, and if they do, they are not our wars, slaves, castles and myths. What we experience, the way we live, is all there is and all there will ever be.

That’s what the people of Greece, Babylon and Rome thought.

Then they became history.

Every moment, we make history. Not in ways that will be remembered for hundreds of years down the road, but because every moment of the past is so much closer than we could ever imagine it to be. The European discovery of North America by Leif Erickson in 1020 CE was 200 years after the officiality of Italy and Germany as nations. People were still being executed in France for treason when the first Star Wars film was being shot. Our understanding of history has become so skewed that we fail to realize how close it truly is to where we are now, how we as people distance ourselves from the past and put it into history textbooks that read like fairy tales.

The past is no fairy tale. We yearn for simplicity in times when everything seems so complicated, in a world where we can truly not understand the truths that are presented to us, or truly know if what we are seeing is the truth. We seek knowledge from the past, clinging onto what remains of the ‘ancient’ world by putting things away in big rooms for guests to understand for themselves. We constantly look to a past that we want to avoid, but can never escape.

There’s a ward of the Kunsthistorisches Museum that is an open-air room that is said to help you clear your mind. Its doors are always open, and the grounds are cleaned regularly to promote its use. On the outskirts of the remains of chaos, the ward serves as a moment of calm, surrounding those who visit it to look at the natural world that exists beyond human control. Our time is short, the ward instructs. Learn from the past, then make your own future.

Or, at least, that is what the photos say.