Shock Treatment

We are jigsaw puzzle fanatics. Our garage walls are covered with framed puzzles we’ve done in the past 3 years. May I suggest new jigsaw puzzle genre? The Pandemic!.

Think about it before you dismiss it. It may, at first, sound weird, but, wouldn’t a large colorful picture of the virus itself make a great historical keepsake? Maybe a large collage of all the types of masks? Or, a collage of all the different occupations which have been so vital to fighting Covid-19. Health care professionals, first responders, teachers. It’s a long list when you really think about it.

When we complete a puzzle, we hang it in our home. That’s not for everyone, but framing just one of the above to pass along to the next generation will be appreciated in 20 years.

And now — today’s “thot” puzzle.

Granite erodes, …..

according to the National Park Service, at a rate of 1/10 of an inch every 1000 years. It’s unlikely to become a big tourist attraction. 

Some change will happen in a heartbeat. Others, such as erosion, might not even be noticed in our life time. These days, it seems, the former is more often the case vs the latter.

It’s known as “future shock”. Quoting ORSON WELLES: “Future shock is a sickness which comes from too much change in too short a time. It’s the feeling that nothing is permanent anymore.

Somewhere around 1980, I read “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler. The book will not cheer you. Toffler presents some accurate predictions; the internet, remote warfare, personal computers, and citizens wearing masks. And, it includes the usual dystopian “Soylent Green” like scenarios of euthanasia and yummy wafers of unknown origin. Published in 1970, Future Shock continues to get a lot of attention. Quoting Toffler; future shock is “too much change in too short a period of time” — exactly what our pandemic world is going through right now.

There are many immediate changes we see covered in the media daily. Some of them real — many of them speculative — just to keep us nervous.

There are also less obvious changes occurring with far reaching effects for the next generation.— climate change?

Will we ever recover from Covid-19? Probably. Will our personal and work lives revert to what they were in 2019? Probably not.

And here’s a quote from Toffler himself which defines the point I’m attempting to make here, “the rate of change has implications quite apart from, and some times more important than, the directions of change”. The faster the changes come, the more it appears that chaos is nigh.

Put your cell phone in the freezer, turn off the T.V., and start a hobby.!