As we begin 2018, I’m reminded of a quote from the seminal movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The titular character says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
How true. In our fast-paced world, it hardly seems like we’ve grown accustomed to something before it changes to an “all-new, all-different” version or even disappears into antiquity.
Remember when you were young and time dragged on forever? Your birthday, Christmas, etc. were NEVER going to get here. The only things that seemed to move fast were weekends, Christmas vacation, and summer break. When we complained of such things, the adults present would nod and smile, knowingly.
Not that I’m at the ripe old age of 44, I realize what that smile was about. Life is practically like being on a rocket to outer space, traveling at unheard of speeds. I can’t imagine if I make it to my retirement years, just how fast life might seem. It’s as if ages 0-21 are all the uphill climb on a roller coaster, and it’s the breakneck speed of the loops and whirls that follows for the remainder of your life.
How can it be 2018? (And where are our flying cars already?) What’s in store for us this coming year? What new and different things will be part of our lives by 2019?
Think about your life so far. How much is completely changed from when you were young? I’m reminded of my middle school science teacher. Her grandmother had traveled across the United States in a covered wagon and lived to see man land on the moon. That’s tremendous change! But even though we haven’t traveled to another new planet in the interim, just how far have humans come?
I remember party lines, cords on my phone, and dialing 0 to talk to an operator. In 2018, fewer than half of all homes still have a landline. You’re only limited in how far you can walk with the phone in hand if you have some spotty cell service in parts of your home. And you hope to get a live person if you call customer service and hit 0.
Cars used to be very solid, made almost entirely of metal for the body. There were some massive family cars cruising the highways of this country, often with kids flung every which way. Seat belts? Maybe. Riding in the bed of the pick-up? You betcha! Now we have vehicles with very little metal, but which gain much better gas mileage. Most people are well-versed in the good use of seat belts and being safe.
I remember being excited when our school got a few computers. A few. They were Apple IIE computers, and we could play Oregon Trail and Number Munchers on them. One of the selling points when I visited Winona State was a computer lab in my dorm. That was pretty sweet. My freshman year, my roommate showed me how to message people instantly in other parts of the country. Whoa! But who would ever NEED to do that? Just pick up the phone.
When I student taught, one of my students showed me how to navigate the World Wide Web. I learned about email. This was all neat, but let’s get back to those encyclopedias and get some research done. Still, when I moved to New Richland in 1996, I had a phone line attached to my computer and had my own email account. I think it was mostly for sending jokes and forwards to my friends. After all, I didn’t want to clog up the phone line by being online for very long.
And this is where life has moved pretty fast. Most kids have cell phones. Most homes have wifi service. Most people don’t spend as much time talking on the phone as they do texting, tweeting, snapping, etc. When I hear a phone in my home ring, there’s usually a moment of startled inaction. What is that strange sound?
I can tap icons on my iPad and be taken instantly to a new world. Long gone are the days of double-clicking everything. If you watch old episodes of Star Trek, you realize that we’ve reached many of their levels of technology with communicators and datapads.
Televisions are another matter. Gone are most of the big console TV sets of the past. Most people have a big, flatscreen TV, maybe even a smart TV. But even there things change. Many people are cutting their cable cords; what we see on our televisions even in the next five years might be drastically different. My kids say they’d rather watch something on their phones or tablets anyway to be more conducive to multi-tasking.
And my own kids are growing up in a blink of the eye. Jayna hasn’t yet finished her sophomore year and is already receiving college materials in the mail. Anton is rapidly catching up to me in height. Was it really supposed to happen this quickly?
I’d like to say that I’ll try to slow down in 2018 and not miss out on life. But with the kids as teenagers, I have to keep moving or I’ll miss out on them as they move toward the top of that roller coaster and a swift trip toward their own lives.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is ergophobia, which means a fear of work, as in, “The student’s resolution was to move past his feigned ergophobia and complete all work in a timely manner.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!