I was asked recently if I thought that I lived in the past. My first reaction was no. I had never been asked that question before and over the next few days I began to think about it. I can certainly understand how one might think that is indeed the case. My memories of the place and time in which many of us were fortunate enough to grow up in are well chronicled. It is a place and a time that is gone forever, but lives vividly in our memory. And that is the case with each generation. Our parents, The Greatest Generation, literally went out and saved the world. Many of the young men who fought in Europe and the Pacific and the young women who served stateside were kids, seventeen and younger, who had adjusted their age in order to go to war and to work. They grew up through The Great Depression and endured hardships that many of us cannot imagine. The time they grew up in was different than ours, just as the time in which their parents were brought up was different than theirs. The time our children grew up in was different than ours and the time their children are growing up in is different than theirs.
Yes, I miss the days of our youth and sometimes wish that we could return to those days. That, of course, is not possible. With each passing year, indeed, with each passing day that time seems further and further away. I read recently that the past is certain. What happened then has happened and cannot be changed. Sometimes we find comfort in that. The future is uncertain and that can be scary. Change can be a very frightening thing. The older we get the more we tend to long for those times that were more carefree.
But, were they really more carefree? From the perspective of fifty or sixty years removed, we tend to focus only on the more idyllic times of our youth. We tend to forget about the stresses and pressures we endured then. Though they may seem trivial now, the anxieties of schoolwork, report cards, peer pressure and conflict were very real. We were just learning to deal with them and they are the same worries and tensions we deal with as adults, just in a different context. Some of us dealt with it then and still deal with it today better than others. While some of us were lucky enough to grow up in a stable environment in relative comfort, that was not always the case with many of our friends and classmates, though we may not have known it at the time. The difficulty of moving to a new school, a new neighborhood or a new city, making new friends and basically a new life was something a lot of us never had to deal with. But, a lot of us did and due to circumstances beyond our control, were forced to deal with it more than once.
I love and cherish the memories of when and where I grew up, but I also have to live and function in the present. Things have come to fruition that we only could dream of years ago. Captain Kirk’s communicator was in essence a flip cell phone, technology that is old hat now. Scotty’s computer, even though it was voice activated, took up a whole deck and then some on the Enterprise instead of a small corner of the bedroom. Predictions were made that one day telephones would have TV screens and we would be able to see each other as we talked. That has happened, only we FaceTime on our hand-held Smart Phone and not the old-timey one on the wall with the long cord and the rotary dial. We are now able to access information instantly through the internet. Dick Tracy had a two-way wrist radio. There are devices that we can wear on our wrists now that not only make calls but can send e-mails and texts, access the internet, run apps, track fitness, manage money and even tell time digitally or analogically.
This is all technology that has made life in many ways easier and better. Through social media we are now able to locate, renew and maintain friendships from long ago as well as cultivating new ones. I am able to share my weekly ramblings with you all, a fact for which I am grateful and fortunate. I will be the first to admit that online shopping is a beautiful thing. Jackie asked me recently, “How did we ever survive without GPS?” My response was, “How did we ever survive without YouTube?” There is a YouTube instructional video for anything at all that you need to fix or would like to build. For someone like me who knows just enough about things to be dangerous, YouTube is an indispensible tool. About the only futuristic thing that hasn’t come to pass yet is the Jetson’s flying car. And, believe me, that’s a good thing. Driving in Atlanta on the ground is harrowing enough. I can only imagine what it would be like in the air.
Yet, we look to the future. There is a quote that says, “Every night we go to bed without any assurance of being alive the next morning, but still we set the alarm to wake up. That’s called Hope.” Another states, “Each day we make plans for tomorrow even though tomorrow is not guaranteed. That is confidence.” I make plans and set my alarm, but each morning that I rise I know that it is not just hope or confidence. It is a blessing. One night I may go to bed and not be able to turn off the alarm the next morning, or wake up one morning and not be able to set the alarm that night. It will happen and there is nothing I can do to change it. All I can do is to look forward to each day and try to make the best of the time that I have left.
So, do I live in the past? Yes. The present? Definitely. The future? Hopefully.