But were the good olde days really all that good? Didn't we have struggles, disappointments, heartbreaks, fears and failures? Or as Solomon wrote, "Say not thou, 'What is the cause that the former days were better than these?' For thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this." As the song asks, "Could it be things were all so simple then, or has time re-written every line?"
Maybe we were just more hopeful, less cynical back in the day? Maybe we just forget the ugly times, or simply ignore them....and focus on the good (which is the stated purpose of this blog!). Perhaps in many ways we are indeed better off now than then, but still somehow the "happy golden days of yore" always feel better to us.
Maybe it's an illusion, a glitch in the human mind, but how often we look back longing for those days we once couldn't wait to pass! But what made the good olde days good? We were younger, stronger, full of hope for the future, doing what we could with what we had, and not even knowing what we didn't have.
It seems to me that for any generation, "the good olde days" were whatever decade they spent their teens and twenties in. I remember how my Dad always used to boast about and idealize The Big Band Era. So, the Great Depression and World War II were the good old days? And Mom always talked about her and her brother growing up on the farm with only their Grandpa to raise them. Must have been a rough life....but still GOOD!
The product I build at work is given a serial number to each unit.....as I'm working I come across a serial number ending in 1979, and suddenly I'm back in High School! I wish I had a dollar for every time I've wished I had a TARDIS to take me back to the '70's!!! True, that decade had all kinds of ugly stuff going on historically and personally, but damn if I wouldn't jump at the chance to go back there!
Seeing the movie Super 8 with the old Fotomat booth and other props form that bygone era takes me back to my childhood and youth! Weird! I love looking at old photo albums and yearbooks, hearing "our" music from back in the day, and, of course lamenting with others from my generation about how cheap everything was back then!
In some ways, the old things were better. When I was a kid, there was no Internet, we had no cell phones; Chuck E. Cheese was a big, fat rat, not a skinny little mouse; women looked like women and men looked like men; the boss handed you a check on payday; you brought that check to the bank and a human teller cashed it for you.
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| 19 or 20? |
the older I get, the further back in my life I look. It's like that warning/disclaimer on your sideview mirror telling you things are closer than they appear. When we look back, we see things differently than we did when they were ahead of us.
It's human nature.
Yes, it's an illusion, a warped view of reality. And one day, years from now, these will be "the good olde days". I know that. We all do. Whatever. Nostalgia still is, and always will be, one of the things we love about life!
