Nothing Remarkable Happened Today

It was just a normal Sunday at Castle Willett. We slept in, went out to breakfast, did our grocery shopping. A friend from high school had a birthday. (Hi, Diane!) I took down the rest of the Christmas lights, I didn’t fall off of any ladders or drop any hammers on my head, we watched some football. My son called from Germany, my daughter called from Sacramento, I wrote a little bit. The cat broke something, the dog was a good girl when other dogs came by our yard. No one died, no one went to the hospital, it was not in any way a red-letter day for any of us.

That was my initial perspective, and it is 100% valid and accurate.

Then I started thinking about what my grandfather, when he was the same age as I am now, might think of everything I did today. (We’re talking mid 1940’s on a farm in South Dakota.) About the only thing he would recognize would be the bacon and eggs, the cat, and the dog.

The digital alarm clock? His probably got wound up by hand.

The HD flatscreen television? I’ll bet that he didn’t have a television in the 1940’s, and the big thing in the 1960’s when he died was color TV.

The iPhone and iPad on my bed stand? I doubt that he had a phone in the 1940’s. I’m not 100% sure they had electricity by that point. Even if he did, then you’ve got that whole comparison of a 1940’s  rotary dial phone with a world-class computer that just also happens to convey phone calls.

Our car, the convertible with the big engine? OK, so the 1940’s Indy cars might or might not have had more horsepower (pole position was won with a speed of 126mph and I’m pretty sure our car could do that on a track), but any car my grandfather ever drove in his life most certainly didn’t. His tractor didn’t have a roof other than his hat, does that count as a convertible?

The 737’s going over our house into Burbank and the 747’s and 777’s going over our house out of LAX toward Asia? Sixteen hours non-stop is a long haul from LAX to Tokyo (been there, done that), but compare that to sixteen hours (with three refueling stops) to get from Los Angeles to New York on a DC-3. As for how commonplace air travel is today, I’m not sure my grandfather ever flew in a plane, ever.

The computers that I’ve used all day to write, do accounting, surf the Internet, read online newspapers? They weren’t even a theoretical dream to anyone on the planet in the mid 1940’s.

If we went to see a movie today, it would be wall-to-wall digital effects to make anything utterly believable, as well as on a huge screen, with flawless projection and eight-channel high quality sound. In the 1940’s, the big, new technological breakthroughs in film were color and stereo.

The ISS went overhead today with six men on board, a vessel that has allowed us to have a continuous human presence off-planet for over thirteen years. The moon’s just rising now, and there are six manned landing sites and twelve sets of boot prints in the dust. We’re driving two separate vehicles on Mars (one of them over ten years old), we have spacecraft currently orbiting Mercury, Mars, and Saturn, we’ve done long duration missions to Jupiter, we’ve swung by Neptune and Uranus, we’re currently on the way to Pluto, and we have spacecraft that have left the freaking solar system and are now in interplanetary space. In the mid 1940’s, only Wernher von Braun and a few of his friends that that his would ever happen.

I’m listening to music from satellite radio and watching live tennis from the Australian Open. Our car radio has dozens of AM stations (all talk and news), several dozen FM stations, or we could plug in our iPods or iPhones. He had a radio the size of my desk with maybe three or four stations he could get during the day, maybe a couple dozen at night. It would have been a big deal to hear something live such as a presidential speech from Washington or war news from Europe.

That was my more introspective perspective, and it also is 100% valid and accurate.

It’s all a matter of perspective, which we forget all too often. “Nothing remarkable happened today” — when you compare today to yesterday. “Mind blown, gobsmacked, and miracles everywhere” — when you compare today to just fifty or sixty years ago, well within a normal lifespan.

Maybe something remarkable did happen today.