Does time ever stand still?
It might come across as a banal observation to say that time doesn’t stand still. Obviously we are all aware of the impact of the passing minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades on our lives. The process of change is in many cases imperceptible, so we stop at particular moments to look back, thinking or saying “where did the time go?”
Some folks can measure the passing of time through growth of their families. People we knew as babies eventually become men and women who make choices for better or worse, out in the world. Those of us who saw their early stages of growth and development soon find ourselves in the position of being indulged for our quaint and old fashioned ways.
How important is it to keep up with trends and be on top of all the new ways of doing things? Being aware of social dynamics and change can make a difference to how effective individuals and groups can be in contributing to the constant ebbing and flowing of culture, but perhaps one needs to know how to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
In the olden days of the music papers such as Melody Maker and the NME, young people looking for careers in pop music would put out calls in the classified sections of those journals, searching for others to join them. The catch phrase of my youth in those calls was “must have image”. At the time, this was a euphemism for the expectation that each performer would have personally cultivated the practice of dressing up like a new romantic, a goth, a soul boy or soul girl or something similar.
Nowadays I walk through shopping malls and hear the music that was touted as being “of the moment” in those days and I think of the performers who still have to perform that music to audiences, several decades after. Those thoughts bring to mind a recurring theme which is… that timelessness is the way to go.
