Nostalgic of the Future

Agreed, our race should not show weakness. The dawn of every morning should find us prepared, as if for war. Our lives have become war, after all. As soon as we exit the safe harbour of our abode our senses sharpen and all our settings are switching to war mode. We are sipping on our coffee at the door and we fail to spare a split second to focus on its taste rather than on its routine. In an almost automatic step we shut out everything personal in favour of our insatiable need to consume "news" from all around the world, and God help, if a discussion unfolds around us on a topic we are not adequately prepared for.

In a next step in our daily routine the agenda of the day unfolds in our minds like a pop-up menu and our brains' algorithm begins to process the data and starts prioritising tasks. The pot of daily information begins to fill-up at a rather fast pace and this ignites another selection process inside our brains, which needs to segregate useful from useless information and route the latter to our mental trash bins. What this access to global news really offers is an insight on the brutality and violence of our kind against its own, an insight on the limitless amount and the versatility on the forms of pain we are capable of producing and what remains as an image is the ugliness of our species, which is sometimes beyond our wildest imagination.

An entire planet in commotion, millions of refugees fleeing their countries in fear trading one type of death for another, killings everywhere whether in schools or by jihadists, and it almost seems that wherever you look you only see decline. Developed countries are fighting the war against terrorism and at the same time the war on privacy and in this context the European enlightenment resembles a nice fairy tale from the distant past. Every time something of a larger scale happens on this planet it somehow causes the limitation of some type of personal right at the other end of the rope. Plane crashes, calamities, war, hunger, disease, devastation wherever your eye balls direct your senses.

And yet, I do recall an earlier stage of my life, where things weren't that bad. Or were they and the simple inability to access that negative information was painting a whole different reality to me back then? With globalisation came the globalisation of fear, of despair, of mass-panic and racism. It is extremely strange as I was born in a foreign country myself, being a foreigner and yet somehow today my tolerance level for foreigners in my own country is somewhat impaired. Of course there are reasons to explain the situation but the big picture is what matters. It is not the outcome but rather the outset of things that makes me wonder.

It is the ease with which one shapes our emotions, as if made of plasticine. It is the ease with which one directs our thoughts often times eliminating common sense in the process. I guess a heavily overpopulated planet needs to feed itself from images of destruction and the end of world scenaria. But then I think to myself, there are millions of children on this planet that are born into a new age and a new era of this planet where their reality is based on virtuality and not on actual events. This produces human beings of different types and backgrounds and sometimes I feel that the dark age and the post-modern age are converging onto the same physical arena painting the canvas of a virtual time-machine.

And then I cannot help myself, and I am rushing to counter the negative emotion by thinking of the magnificent feats of this species, who is also capable of producing literature, poetry, music and art in all of its forms traditional, contemporary, modern and post-modern. I cannot help the overflow of emotions every time I read either the poetry of Elytis or the post-modern literature of Ioanna Retzoula, or when I listen to Rolando Villazon performing "L' alba" creating the same uplifting emotion that I feel when I listen to George Michael's extremely modern remake of "True Faith" or Modesta's song "Prototype". When I look at the Parthenon I feel that urge to express endless admiration in the form of an eternal lasting breath with the same intensity that this emotion comes up in me when looking at the Chrysler Building or the Burj Halifa.

And all of this strangely enough makes me nostalgic of the future and the past at the same time, yet I do also acknowledge my deepest fear for the internet of things and how it will affect the remainder of my life. The wedding of the past with the things yet to come is truly exciting. I guess in the end, we all seek for our individual formula that will create the mixture of opposites that each can handle. Opposites co-exist, they always have as they are the mere reflection of the true human nature. We are a rare species of contradictions and confusion. We feed from our own flesh to the same extent that we feed from the flesh of others around us. We create beauty with the same pace we create ugliness but the beholders have different eyes. We look at the same things but feel different vibes. We all share one common truth, the truth of our short passage through this planet, but we all approach it differently, some of us in a more passive way, others in a more creative one. The knowledge of our expiration is shaping our personalities and is defining our actions in time. Each and every one of us has a certain capacity to perform but only few exploit it to the fullest. Ending this post I would like to remind of the old "Apple" ad that said: "the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do". Cheers!