The beaches in Southern California traditionally make a transition from May gray to June gloom. The gray stays the same, it’s just the month that changes. Even though the sun appears in the afternoon, I still enjoy the gray, blanket-like feeling of the cloud cover. It seems peaceful, even tranquil in the beach communities. I know it’s just an illusion, but I enjoy the feeling anyway. At times like this I become pensive, even philosophical, and start looking for the meaning of life and answers to the difficult questions.
The concepts of past and future are illusions of a sort. The past is composed of memories, sometimes accurate, sometimes faded and idealized or mixed or telescoped together with many other incidents, even dreams. But the past has already happened. The future is uncertain, wishful thinking, fear of the unknown, or pasted up with yellow stickies or “To Do” lists. All of this in the past or future is in a gray area. It is unreachable and mostly incomprehensible.
Only the present is valid in our day to day living. Our life styles will not permit daydreaming under normal circumstances. Our lives are too complicated. We learn to deal with this as we age, and everyone ages. We accumulate experiences, ideas, techniques, patterns, and schedules which help us make it through days, weeks, months and years. We create customs based on the patterns of our parents and grandparents and pass these on to our children and grandchildren. When we are younger, we weed out the inconsequential and keep what is really important in our lives, and then start to think about what in next in our lives. As parents we draw upon our experiences, both good and bad to help our own children to mature. And each next day, the present becomes the past and the future becomes now.
There is always an exception. Those among us who are able to live in the past, present and future. They include the creative: the thinkers, seers, innovators, writers, composers, inventors, artists, sculptors, designers, researchers, scientists, mathematicians, etc, who daily live to some extent in the gray area of life. Some of these people deal with processes and some deal with values, some with history past and some with history extrapolated into the future. All are valuable to us for the broadening of our thinking. Our task is to temper the ideas and values presented to us with our own common sense.
Our own common sense is based on our own experiences and perspectives which have worked for a period of time in our own lives. There are many changes that we face every day. These changes eventually begin to coalesce into common sense values from which we can assimilate and then pass on to our own children . Think of the style changes in music from the beginning of the twentieth century until now. These and the other arts and sciences tend to illustrate the above points.
From the 1900’s and into the 1950’s, music was acoustic. There was nothing electric until the microphone and recording took over. This affected what music was written and how it was performed. Within these restrictions music reflected to moods and changes in society at that time. When electricity took over in the mid 50’s, music took over, but there was a symbiotic relationship with music and society. Who was influencing who? We are getting close to another change in music which brings it even closer to us. Maybe this is good. This is a gray area for the moment, but style changes are more and more frequent.
This brings us back to values and common sense. It is easy for us and our children to get lost in abundance. What used to keep us grounded now floats in virtual reality. Our society is reflecting this. We must look to the past before we let ourselves be pulled into the future. We need to make sure that the new and compelling songs we hear are not sirens whisking us to a place we would rather not be. Listen to the present and sing of the present before venturing into the unknown. Let us be grounded in common sense.