Listen to thisI imagine this may be mentioned else where in the journal this month but I wanted to let you know that my friend Niall who also writes a column here had a baby boy today.
I guess to be more accurate I should say that his wife Susan had a baby boy. Conor. What a wonderful event. A baby. A new life for him and a change of life for Susan and Niall. A change of life that they are probably only beginning to comprehend. That’s the way of the world though isn’t it? You can only ever begin to comprehend tomorrow. You can only guess at what might happen tomorrow. Maybe by really thinking hard we can see the briefest glimpse of what tomorrow could be like but in fact for those of us over a certain age I doubt if we can even really get a glimpse. Those like Conor who were born today (although with the time change between Canada and Ireland it was probably yesterday) will live in a very different world than we have today. That is also the way of life. That is also the way of the world.
I think about being a parent a lot. I wish all parents could have the gift (or the curse) of seeing their children and their children and their children grow old. I wish we could see the impact our parenting has upon the world. But alas like Moses we can only, at best, go the top of the mountain with our children. We can see the Promised Land but never get there. As adults we can see the possibilities of tomorrow, but only from a distance. This has always been the case but I think even more so today. Change is so rapid and so far reaching, most of us don’t have the ability to see even the possibilities. We can see something but our “glasses" are so shaped by the world in which we have grown up that we really have to challenge the validity of our sight.
The world always changes but it seems to me that even change is changing. Five hundred years ago change happened, but for the most part very slowly. Most of our ancestors lived and died where they were born. They had a good sense of what was going to happen tomorrow because it was just more of what happened today. Change for most people, other than that which came with the seasons and the passages of life, was minimal. In the last hundred years or so, the rate of change has been accelerating. My grandmother Casey was born in the 1880s in the East End of London England. She never ventured far from home even as an adult. Yet she saw spectacular change. She saw the advent of cars, of electricity in her district, indoor plumbing, central heat, radio, television and computers. She was even alive when the English started to realize that vegetables had taste if you didn’t actually boil them to death. She lived through two world wars and was bombed out of three houses. In her hundred years on this planet she saw things that even the dreamers were not dreaming about when she was a little girl. A lot of change.
Yet with all the change she saw, I think her great grand children – my children – will see even more. Yet, since they are entering adulthood, even they will probably not see as much as Conor will see in his life “change so rapid that it will probably not even seem like change.
Many of us adults are unsettled by the speed of change today. It feels at times like the world is happening around us. It seems like we’re floating in a rapid flowing river – as if we’re going for the most part in the right direction while all the time knowing that the direction has little to do with us. we’re just along for the ride. The young ones have more of a sense of being in control of this process of change. They’re not floating along but rather have grabbed a canoe and a paddle and are racing down the river, going even faster than the river itself. They are not blinded by the past and as such can see the world in a new way. They can look down the river and steer a solid course. This gives them tremendous power. The power to truly make this a better world. So this is to Conor. May his journey down the river be challenging yet true. May his canoe be swift and his paddle strong. May he help make this a better world. I’m sure he will.
