Time is a Funny Thing

Source of photo: The Healthy

I remember penny candy. I remember when you could buy a chocolate bar, a pop (*) and a bag of chips for 25 cents. I remember when a postage stamp cost 8 cents. I remember listening to music on records – 45s and LPs, to be exact. Cell phones were the stuff of science fiction but you could find a telephone booth on every corner and a phone call cost a dime. I recall how scandalised everyone was when the cost of making a call in a phone booth went up to 25 cents. I remember when computers were as big as a room and almost no one had ever laid eyes on a real one, except for a handful of scientists with obscure titles. When I was in university back in the early 80s, I only called home (collect, of course) on Sunday evenings, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. because that was the only time of the week when the cost of a call was affordable.

I wrote so many letters during those years: to my parents, to my sister, to my cousins, to my grandparents and to friends who had gone to different universities. Until very recently, I still had boxes of responses to my old letters. I marvelled, when I went through them, at the hours and hours I must have spent, just writing. I recalled the big callous I used to have on my middle finger from writing all those letters – not to mention essays and various other reports – by hand. It’s hard to believe just how much time we had on our hands back then: T.V. was limited to two or three channels; we had no devices, no Internet, no YouTube, no Pinterest or Spotify. The hours upon hours that folks (including myself) now spend on their devices per day, were wide open.

It’s funny how every twenty-year old thinks they will never (!!!) be as old as their parents: there is nothing quite as smug as the young adult ready to start their lives, self-righteously thinking they will do everything better than their parents did.

And then suddenly, there you are, staring in the mirror at your grey hair and your wrinkles, and what seemed like the Dark Ages to you as a child (say, the year your parents were born) is what your birth year is going to be to the child born just last year.

I was eight months old during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The first significant world event I remember was the lunar landing: I was 7 years old. When I was born, ‘60 years ago’ was 1902: an unthinkably long time ago; the ‘olden days’; distant history. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that 1962 is as much a part of a one-year-old’s distant history as 1902 was for me.

The first significant world event my Grammy remembered was the sinking of the Titanic. I was more than a little in awe the first time I realised she was that old.

The first significant world event my children remember is 9/11. And one day, little children will look at my children in awe as they speak of all they remember of that unspeakable day.

Oh, dear 20-year-old: take it from me: life is short. Before you have time to catch your breath, a youngster will be looking back sixty years before they were born; at the year you were born; and they will marvel at the living, breathing relic standing before them.

One day, everything we know right now will have been reduced to a chapter or two in a school history book. All the i’s will have been dotted; all the t’s will have been crossed. All the links will have been made; all the outcomes will have been determined. One day, historians will either shudder in horror at the atrocities our generation committed or they will smile condescendingly at the tempests in a teapot we made such a fuss over.

Likely, they will do both.

Time is an illusion: we only really have now. I know I sound like a walking cliché, but try to worry less. Look up more. Smile at a stranger. Be kind to your Mom/ Dad/ brother/ sister/ friend. Be kind to a perfect stranger. Strike up a conversation with your grandmother or grandfather. Plant something and chart its progress.

And breathe…

It all goes by so fast.

(*) that’s a soda, if you are an American

Patti Moore Wilson/© wednesdayschildca.wordpress.com

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AND… A FEW PREVIOUS POSTS YOU MIGHT LIKE TO CHECK OUT…

• Little Girl
• My Search for Mindfulness: Learning to be in the Moment
• How I Overcame My Germ Phobia

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