It’s strange this generations infatuation with the past and
future. No one wants to live now, in the present, we all want to live 200 years
ago, when manners were better and your place in society clearer, or we want to
live in the future, a place of high tech gadgets and no wars or crime. Yet,
both ‘realities’ seem completely unrealistic. Did people in the past dream
about the future? Did they think that the present couldn’t possibly be as good
as the past or the future too? Many authors have tried to predict the future,
but they’ve always been wrong.
We look at black and white pictures of great grandparents
and long lost ancestors, and I find myself wishing pictures could talk. Was it
a better life then? I wish I knew them, I wish that they could tell me about their
life. Everyone else’s life seems so much interesting to your own. But did they
look at paintings and wish they were born 100 years ago? Or did they hazard
guesses about the future? Did they predict a time when there would be no wars
or hate? Did they look back and long for the fashions of yesteryear, which
would look so out of place now? Surely there isn’t much difference between
being a teenager in the past and being one now? Nor will there be much
difference in the teenagers of the future?
Yet as fashions and technology changes and evolves, so do
thoughts and teachings. Long ago it was accepted that the earth was flat, but
now we are all certain it is round. How can we be certain if something that was
certain has so radically changed? If there was such a way to go backwards in
time, would we see a better life? Or perhaps maybe we would want to select the
bits we want from each time and put them together? The fashion, etiquette,
un-ruined natural beauty of the past, with no pollution or looming skyscrapers
combined with modern thoughts and ideas and discoveries, supported by
futuristic medicine, exploration and solutions.
Yet in each generation, solutions are found for problems
that didn’t exist in the previous one, so they couldn’t have been made sooner.
Our issues in modern day society didn’t exist 200 years ago, so we as society
are destroying and creating problems for ourselves, all in the hope of
discovering something else about the world we live in. The energy demand, the
food demand, all comes from a growing, technology driven population, of a magnitude
leaders of the past couldn’t have imagined.
With all the modern issues, we look to the past for
solutions and to the future for possibilities. Yet what about the present? The
present is constantly ignored, overlooked and brushed aside in favor for “It
used to be” and “it will be.” What happened to “it is?”
All these thoughts have come from an old black and white
picture. If they could talk could they give us some answers? Could they
reassure us that our thoughts are the same as theirs? And can we tell them the
answer to our own question – when we are looked back on in 100, 200, 300 years,
will they see an outdated, uneducated society? Or will they see an interesting,
colorful one, full of new discoveries and adventures? Are our frontiers of
technological advances akin to the geographical explorations of the past? And
what will be left for our grandchildren’s grandchildren to find?
As we move along the time line of humanity, we want to look
back and see what we don’t know. We’re here, at this point from documenting
past discoveries, but what about the undocumented ones? What about daily lives
that weren’t recorded? And what will happen to the over-documented lives of
today? Will the World Wide Web simply delete all of the dead accounts and old
information? Will we ever reach a point when virtual documentation takes over,
and nothing physical no longer exists?
Will the entire human history comedown to a single memory chip,
only to be destroyed in a big bang, and started all over again. How many times
has this happened before? Is time a circle which will continue forever? What
significance is time?
If time is what we label it, who is to say that this
entire reality hasn’t happened before, and we are all just a recycled mass of
repeating discoveries, thoughts and people, doomed to run the same course over
and over again, always running short of the final discovery. There is no escape
of reality, yet we as a society constantly attempt to revert to the past, or
look forward to the future, and altogether dismiss here and now.
If pictures could talk, what would they say?
