So this morning on the train the song “Hotel California” popped up on my iphone and while I was listening to it I came to think “wow this is a really old song”  then it got me thinking about how its a song my dad’s generation would’ve listened to and how its one of those songs that old people would say “back in the day we used to listen to…”.  So that got me thinking about the times we’ve lived through and how we let things simply fly past,  I speak for myself mainly but generally when something big happens I think to myself “Oh wow, thats pretty serious” but then a few days (or weeks depending on severity) you just kind of forget it and not give it a second thought.  911 is a prime example of this, I mean for most of us Australians it really was just something that happened in a distant land, too far for us to really care about it.  I mean we were shocked and surprised like the rest of the world but now, years down the track who gives a second thought to 911?  We know about it, but we just don’t care.

Thinking back, we’ve lived through some pretty fast-paced times.  I mean when I was a kid I was using black and white macs (yes the screens were black and white, no colour), we’ve lived through dial-up, cable, ADSL and now ADLS2, music has changed quite a bit too, we’ve seen the rise and fall of superstars, the death of Michael Jackson.  A lot of things happen and we kind of just go with the flow which is not necessarily a bad thing.

But thinking about it, at age 21, I can easily say “I’ve lived through such and such times” to someone even just a few years younger, and I get people only a few years older than I am telling me stuff that I have never experienced (and never will)  Am I old? Perhaps. But thats not the point.  When we let things fly by us so quickly and rapidly we don’t really appreciate the significance of the times we live through, but a few years down the track when/if we start to reflect we start to realise how profound the changes we’ve lived through are.

Perhaps its a good idea to keep note of the events we might deem ’significant’ and see how we think of them in a few years, a time line might provide a visual representation of how turbulent our lives are.  This also makes me think that if I was to make a personal timeline of my own personal significant events (the good and the bad) it might interesting to see what it holds…  More on that later perhaps.