Noticing Part 1

I continue to think about the reinforcing side of the era we’re currently in. There are teachings and good that emerge from the worst of crisis and challenge. History tells us that. From the residue of calamity, patterns emerge reflecting broad shifts and views with accompanying invention and discoveries in things like medicine, education, architecture, spiritual beliefs, the arts and so on.

In recent centuries, the industrial era was robust with innovation that changed just about everything, from transportation to the places we lived, how we lived and foremost how we worked and played. War and the Great Depression were catalysts for an abundance of creations; technology, size of families, mobility et al. shifted in the rhythms of each decade; the continuum of one generation bound into a braiding of influences from a previous generation is irrevocably part of our experience. The basic thought is that we learn from the past and attempt to make changes in the course of our lives that will contribute in a beneficial way to the next age. It’s not a guaranteed proposition, yet it’s rooted in hope.

From this minute on, the global pandemic effect on our lives will be captured in every medium now existing and will crowd our personal and collective thinking as it forms part of a historical account, a record of what has occurred on our watch. What I understand is that every period of substantial transformation dissolves like a footprint in sand as the next footprint is imbedded and taking its place. It can almost appear as a pattern of natural history, as if studying any ecosystem or, more so, the theory of development itself.

It seems that humankind, while generally striving for betterment, has for the most part ignored and continue to look the other way from the betterment of our wellbeing and our place on earth. A lot of the so-called improvement on the domestic front has been driven by our penchant for convenience and want. Consumerism is a deficit, a cult-like drive where we attempt to satisfy an inner void with the next thing—a quick fix that is temporary at best. We allow cities to lose their inner soul, we plan housing that is imaginatively arrested because imagination takes time and care to manifest. We have been seduced into behaviours that are now, more than ever, revealing to us where those behaviours have taken us.

From my own observations of late I would say that a forced slowing down of the tempo of the globe has opened many to a re-examination of lifestyles and life priorities. In the midst of the Cold War that followed WWII, military use advanced computer technology with the add-on of interfacing one system to another. Twenty years later the Internet came into public use and we generally know the rest of the story that brings us to today. What I wonder though, has technology formed a faux world that is fuelling the divides that are more and more apparent? This is not a new phenomenon. Political leaders and religious bodies have historically commissioned artists to create expansive public art works to advance their views, thereby creating divides. No doubt the present immediacy of communication is quick in disseminating the dark side of our past. Perhaps it will contribute to paths of understanding.

To be continued…