I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled
~ T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Hmmm, will I fare well in the judgment of that water drop moment?
When I grow old and wear the bottom of my trousers rolled and look back upon the landscape of my life, I will be obligated to examine how I acted in those unexpected, paradigm-changing periods that shifted the axis of life.
I would never have expected that the entire world would be taken hostage for two years, almost brought to a standstill, by a virus that had existed for 50 years and will continue to exist for 50 years or more into the future.
In the light of final reflection, I will ponder that conundrum and wonder how much the trajectory of mankind was diverted by the pandemic and whether it needed to be so.
I would never have expected that a man who inherited wealth and yet declared bankruptcy six times for his businesses, promised to build a wall across the U.S. / Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it, would become the 45th President (and possibly the 47th) of the United States.
In the light of final reflection, I will ponder that conundrum and wonder what it says about the restlessness and discontent of the nation in which it happened.
I would never have expected that we would arrive at a time when 10% of the world’s population controls 90% of wealth, when the net worth of the world’s richest person would be over $250 billion while growing numbers of people are destitute and homeless.
In the light of final reflection, I will ponder that conundrum and wonder how control of the purse strings fell into the hands of so few.
I would never have expected that the Internet of Things would create a parallel, alternative world in a virtual landscape and that an intelligence tug of war would evolve between the human mind and the artificial brain.
In the light of final reflection, I will ponder that conundrum and wonder if there was a threshold in that journey that should never have been crossed.
I would never have expected that mankind would turn a blind eye to the health of our planet for the sake of greedy consumption and keep moving steadily down that road even when the dire consequences were clear.
In the light of final reflection, I will ponder that conundrum and wonder if my generation is the one that witnessed the beginning of the end.
When I grow old and wear my trousers rolled, I will have to ask if there were forks in the road where we as a species chose wrong. Equally important, I will have to gaze into my image in a waterdrop and ask if I did enough in my small sphere of influence to try and tip the scales for the better.
~ Now Available Online from Amazon, Chapters Indigo or Barnes & Noble: Hunting Muskie, Rites of Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet
~ Michael Robert Dyet is also the author of Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel (now out of print) which was a double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com .
~ Subscribe to Michael’s Metaphors of Life Journal aka That Make Me Go Hmmm at its’ internet home www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog2. Instructions for subscribing are provided in the Subscribe to this Blog: How To instructions page in the right sidebar. If you’re reading this post on another social networking site, come back regularly to my page for postings once a week
Tags: metaphor · Michael Robert Dyet · T.S. Eliot · The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock · water dropNo Comments.