They were such times...

It was such a time, such a world, with such places, sights and things, and we were such people as once knew and moved through such a world.

It was also a world deep-scarred by the cruel hand of war.

But was it really as we are now pleased to remember it? Were those places and things as we recall them so many years long past? Were we those people, those fresh young faces? Did it happen as our memory has fixed it in our mind’s eye? Was it in this same world, in these same places and spaces where it all went on? Was it here that we lived a life that was of that time and of that world, never to be so again?

Does this happen anymore?

Was it for these times that we strove and for these things that we longed and for this state of being that we dreamed? Could we have imagined how it would be, how we would fare, and how our lives would run their course far into the future? That future is now this present, and this present is also our future and... our future end. The hopes and dreams of years to come are the memories and souvenirs of years now gone. The fresh waters of the fast-flowing river have slowed to the stagnant water of a turgid lake and we did not see when one became the other.

They were such times whose rich promise matched and stoked our desires, such days as stretched out to infinity. The world was always as we had come to know it and would forever be so. Family and friends too continued seemingly unchanging since first we knew them and would always be such. Our universe was stable, predictable, constant, slow and knowable, and we had it in our hand and under our control. So we thought.

Were we the last generation that would feel the undiluted promise of the future? Were we the last of the innocents, the dreamers, the hopefuls? Was the world we knew breathing its last while we opened the doors of experience that loomed limitless before us? In a time when the instantaneous and the global promised more than they delivered, could we have imagined our existence otherwise? We the hopeful, the gullible, the naïve, the children of the war generation scarred by savage conflict and full of terrible memories.

The Beatles will forever be identified with the 1960s

But either way it did not matter. It did not depend on us. The clock ticked on, patiently marking the passage of time, the days altered in colour and meaning, our certainties grew less certain, our values and beliefs grew dimmer and less reassuring, and our lives became imbued with a sense of apprehension we could not understand. But we were young and simple and confident and brash, and we had the wind in our sails and the sun on the horizon. We had youth and strength and energy and resolve, and we would not be told.

Yet even as we had youth in our bones and hope in our hearts, our era, our world, was nearing its end and it was not the world that our fathers had fought and died for or even imagined. As the old generations passed out of this realm and we took up the baton of life, stepping diffidently into the breach, we could not know we would be the first generation that would be shaken to the core by a tide of change that would sweep away all certainty, stability, conviction and self-assurance and leave a void in our hearts and anxiety in our souls.

They were such times as shall never again be seen and we were such folk as could glimpse the limitless possibilities of a world that was on the move, set in motion by the past and driven forward by the future.  Glimpse them we might but understand them we could not. The fast-flowing but tame river of life was turning into a raging torrent that would burst its banks and hurls us all into an unknown landscape where nothing was as it seemed, where the transient would replace the constant and the fast and furious would dislodge the slow and steady.  

Those unmistakable bell-bottoms of the 1970s!

The past was ours, the present is everybody's, and the future is out of our hands. So it is and so it has always been. The world we came into was black and white and grey and grim; the world we leave behind is a kaleidoscope of colours and a confusion of sights and sounds. We lived and we died and were reborn and must die again. We are you and you are us. You lived in us and now we will live in you. You are our future and we are your past.

In us you see yourselves and our hopes will be your hopes, our laughter and tears will be your laughter and tears, our joys and fears will be your joys and fears, our dreams will be your dreams. We once gave you life as you yourselves now give life, and some day to come you may say to those that follow: “It was such a time, such a world, with such places, sights and things, and we were such people as once knew and moved through such a world."

(Dedicated to my beloved mother who passed away so many years ago and whose passing changed me forever. She has lived in me as I may hope to live in my children. God bless her!)