Back to the Future - Our New Normal 2021

Time travellers should prepare for tough sledding. If you went back to 1820 or even 1920, all the sudden changes would discombobulate you. And the same is true for someone who came forward to today.

We’ve got a deep-seated desire for things to go back to normal, the way we were used to.

But this, this moment of ours is now normal.

For now.

And then, there will be another normal.

There is no “the new normal”. Because that’s definitive.

There’s simply the normal of now.

A new normal. This too shall pass.

“We sense that ‘normal’ isn’t coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.”
― Charles Eisenstein

Perceived Infinity -Wyong, NSW, Australia 2015

Live in the Present

People give us advice all day long - parents, lifestyle coaches, magazines, self-help gurus.  What a pity most of it is wrong!

Here is some food for thought:
Live in the present - This piece of advice is so often cited it has become a reason for NOT living in the present, since so much of the "present" now consists of people lecturing us about how we should live in it.

Actually the recollected past and the anticipated future are both quite nourishing places.  The present nearly always involves a soup of distractions; it contains the thing that's important, plus lots of things that get in the way.

Recollecting the moment you stood in front of a favourite painting/sculpture, for example, is often better than the moment itself, in recollection you can strip out all the things that were unimportant: your sore feet, the couple talking loudly behind you, the queue for admission.  Memory pares down the moment to its essence.

The same is true of the birth of a child, a kiss, a bushwalk.  In memory, the experience is at its most intense and pure.  After remembering these things in blissful reverie, we can then anticipate similar, or better, experiences in the future, the hoped-for experience fizzing in our mind in a way that is pure and unencumbered.

I'm not attacking the present.  It's highly useful in prompting both recollection and anticipation - the real things in life.

"Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start."
~~ Nido Qubein

Here is a picture of Joseph, 10 years ago (July 2009).  Love that boy!

Making Up Our Own Minds

"Make up your mind" is a phrase that's rarely used without some undercurrent of frustration or impatience.

It is likely to be thrown at us when we can't seem to act decisively. Or when we can't choose instantly between competing possibilities. We might use it ourselves if we know what we want and someone else seems to be dithering.

It is a phrase that sends a strong message of criticism - as though instant decision-making were itself a virtue, regardless of the seriousness of the situation.

The chance to make up our own minds - and to know them - is one of the greatest gifts of human consciousness. In lives as privileged as most of ours are, "choice" has real meaning.

We can "make up our minds" about our most fundamental decisions - including our lifestyle, values, relationships, beliefs and goals.

We can't determine everything that happens to us, but we can decide what steps we will then take. We can think hard about our strengths and how we are using them. We can also take charge of what influences us......recognising this can be daunting. But I see it as liberating.

"Making up our own minds" means we are not letting circumstances, laziness or other people make up our minds or run our lives for us.

Self-responsibility triumphs here.

And it lets us set the compass for our future!

"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."
~~ Ralph Emerson


My friend Dianne made up her mind that cancer was not going to sap the life out of her. She is fighting it and winning! Photo of Dianne in her art studio Feb 2007.

What Does the Future Hold

WE STAND at the petrol bowser, slumped but attentive, watching the screen count upwards. The number is awesome, in the sense of inspiring awe. Shock and awe. How can it be that high? How can they make counting machines that move that fast?

You expect people to shout out, to curse, yet there's a strange quiet on the petrol station forecourt. We're like penitents in some strange religious service. We pay up and limp off like beaten dogs.

People say the car will soon disappear - priced out of the reach of all but the rich. Yet it's tough work imagining life without the car. Around here, it's a part of life; a strange tumour wrapped around our essential organs.

For the past five decades, the car has been the ultimate symbol of escape - the tool that unshackled us from our parents. It has been the ticket to freedom. The badge of adulthood.

There are so many things we'll lose, once the car disappears. Like the peculiar smell of stale milk and squashed lollies that built up around a child's car seat.
Or the best route from Sydney to Brisbane. Or - in the dying days of petrol - how to get an extra kilometre to the litre by coasting down the hills, or removing your roof racks, or filling up on cold mornings when the petrol was less likely to vapourise before it went into the tank.

"Oh yeah, mate, I'd save 5, maybe 6, cents a week, just by filling up at the right time, in terms of the diurnal temperature range."

The family holiday will be the most obvious casualty of life without the car. A whole culture will be wiped out - the long trips up the coast, the Boxing Day traffic jams, the way all the parents were driven insane somewhere around Macksville by the 44th repeat of the Wiggles CD.

Perhaps people will keep the old traditions alive, much like enthusiasts recreate medieval battles. Unable to leave home due to high fuel costs, families will just re-enact the traditional holiday - the kids forced to sit on the lounge-room couch for six hours at a stretch, chanting "Are we there yet?" while the father threatens to "Stop this car this bloody minute unless everyone shuts up and lets me drive."

Dad will be saying this, of course, sitting on a kitchen chair, placed just in front of the couch, his hands on an imaginary steering wheel. The mother will sit next to him, pointing out the speed limit. Occasionally they'll throw a packet of chips into the back, keeping the kids quiet for another stretch of pretend highway.

Once the car is consigned to the dustbin of history, there will be a wave of nostalgia. Maybe Old Sydney Town can reopen as the Petroleum Museum and Display Village. Just need to work out how people will get there.

It will be a great place, all the same. We'll have a fake drive-in, people squeezed together in stationary cars and the sound coming through those little speakers hung from the window. The cars would be immoveable - long ago emptied of petrol - so you'd miss the pleasure of driving off with the speaker still attached.

And then there'll be the pop music hall of fame, with the Ted Mulry Gang singing Jump In My Car, and Aretha Franklin belting out Freeway Of Love.

People will nod, tap their feet in time and remember the good old days. Sure, what happened was inevitable; in the end the private car had to go. But then they'd shake their heads and lament the new generation of singers, no longer able to sing about that glorious and destructive beast, the private automobile.

Somehow that new track, Jump On My Bus, isn't nearly as funky.

This is me in 1974 in my Sprite at the family home in Chatswood, Sydney.