“It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.”
~ Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
Endings are notoriously difficult, unless we’re talking about the end of a dentist visit or the end of a war, or some other unpleasantry. Then we breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Wow! Glad that’s over!” But life is filled with endings of all flavors, whether it’s sending a little one to kindergarten or a big kid off to college, a friend moving to another state, a change in our health status, the end of a relationship, or a loved one shuffling off this mortal coil.
Most of the time we manage these endings with a reasonable amount of grace. Sometimes we don’t. Endings that are generational in scope seem to stump us. Who hasn’t caught themselves saying (or at least thinking), “the music from my generation was so much better than what they’re putting out nowadays.” And it doesn’t end with music. Big-scale changes — endings — set our collective teeth on edge.
No one thinks twice today about seeing a car go by or an airplane overhead or flipping the switch on an electric light. Not so long ago all those things were novelties, and no matter how comfortable we are with them now, the folks who were alive when they were introduced were not always happy about those newfangled inventions, and they spewed misinformation and conspiracies about those new things with regularity.
Take the early days of steam-powered trains, for example. Those who feared the train with its size and speed and power insisted that women were not “designed” to go 50 miles an hour, and if they did their uteruses would be dislodged. Years later, as automobiles gained popularity, critics referred to them as “devil wagons,” and also attributed female health problems to motorized transportation (they’d gotten over the train fears by that time). Early telephones were thought to cause everything from possession to electrocution.
Bringing this sort of societal panic about new technology into more recent history… who wasn’t told not to sit too close to the television? Or not to look into the microwave while it was running? I can’t remember why I wasn’t supposed to sit too close to the giant box of a television. Or why looking through the microwave door spelled disaster.
I do know I shudder at the idea I’m doomed to morph into one of those crotchety grumblers bewailing anything new or different as an existential threat to my identity. While on Facebook. On my smartphone app.
Ah… the irony.
By Niki Turner
