This post is in response to the Blog of the Week (#bow) prompt in the Silver Blogger’s group (
Looking back to look forward:
I was twenty-one years old and it was the first New Year’s Eve I could legally drink alcohol!
Grunge music was saturating the Columbus, Ohio music scene and the Brewery District, which was situated just west of German Village and both neighborhoods were at their absolute peak of hipness and popularity. My fiance at the time and I bought tickets to a New Year’s Eve celebration at one of the dance clubs in the Brewery District that included appetizers, party favors, and a champagne toast at midnight.
It was a night that should have been fun for me but the vibe was off the entire evening. I felt restless and generally unhappy. We were both still living with our parents. It was becoming clear that she envisioned a very different kind of life than I did. She wanted to settle down and have children immediately, I didn't. I was enrolled in college but had no clear plans for my future and was writing poetry and freelance pieces while working a dead-end warehouse job. I remember when the ball dropped at midnight and we kissed. I realized how fearful I was for our future and in that moment I silently wished for a major change in my life.
Strangely, that wish is what I remember most about the night. I made it with such resolve and when I did I got goosebumps. The wish very much came true. I had no idea at that time that my fiance and I would break up just a few months later and just three years later I’d be leaving everything I ever knew for a new life in Minnesota.
Now I’m fifty and happy (much happier than old Willy Shakespeare above). I feel the contentment and gratitude of a man whose dreams have come true, just not in the ways in which I imagined. Pretty much the only thing in common between 1992 and 2022 will be the bubbly.
The only restlessness I feel now is that of wanderlust. I absolutely can’t wait to travel again. My wife and I fully realize that we’ll probably just have the enthusiasm for international travel for another decade or so and we fully intend to make the most of it.
I don’t feel the need to be out and about for New Year’s Eve much anymore, especially not during the waning days of a pandemic. We’ll probably stay in and have our son over for movies, wine, and snacks as has become tradition in the last few years.
Life looks very different from this perspective. I look back and see that many of the things that used to excite and motivate me no longer do. I also realize that many of the worries that nagged at my twenty-one year old self were nothing to worry about at all but only catalysts to prod me to take action to make a better life.
I never could have guessed the adventures, joys, and struggles I had between 1992 and 2022 but in retrospect that was half the fun.
As I write this I can’t help but wonder what New Year’s Eve will be like in 2042. I’ll be seventy, my wife will be seventy-four. We’ll have stepped foot on every continent on Earth and even ventured to the edge of the atmosphere to see the planet from space.
We’ve collected a lot more memories, and done some lasting good in this world through the creation of our charitable foundation. Smartphones will be a thing of the past. We’ll all be wearing AR glasses or probably more like AR lens implants.
Air taxis and hyperloops have overtaken airline travel for all but international flights. Hypersonic planes will fly us from NYC to Asia in about an hour. Nuclear fusion and renewable energy will provide safe, cheap, and abundant power. Formerly third-world countries will be major economic powerhouses as they were able to leap frog many of the established nations in terms of economic and technological evolution. The combined GDP of Africa is now greater than China.
Bitcoin will be the world’s global reserve currency and will have established a reliable floor at over a million USD per coin. No one measures Bitcoin's value in USD anymore though or even by an entire Bitcoin. Because of its high value In 2041 bitcoin will just be measured in Sats and MilliSats. Many alt coin projects have come and gone but blockchain technology has transformed many aspects of our lives from logistics, to how we govern, to how our economy works.
There will be a live feed from human colonies on Mars and the Moon showing the ball dropping there as well as in Times Square, Beijing, and other major cities around the globe. A trip to the Moon, especially, will be a tourist destination that most people will be able to afford at least once in their lives.
The Mars colony will still be too small to support tourism just yet but that will come in the decades following. By New Year’s Eve 2041 we’ll have entered a new age of peace and prosperity and us seniors will be sharing our wisdom along with stories about the violence, division, and many struggles of our current time.
This was such a fun bit of time travel. Many thanks to the contest's sponsors for creating it!
All for now.
With Gratitude,
Eric Vance Walton
(Gifs sourced from Giphy.com)
Poetry should move us, it should change us, it should glitch our brains, shift our moods to another frequency. Poetry should evoke feelings of melancholy, whimsy, it should remind us what it feels like to be in love, or cause us to think about something in a completely different way. I view poetry, and all art really, as a temporary and fragile bridge between our world and a more pure and refined one. This is a world we could bring into creation if enough of us believed in it. This book is ephemera, destined to end up forgotten, lingering on some dusty shelf or tucked away in a dark attic. Yet the words, they will live on in memory. I hope these words become a part of you, bubble up into your memory when you least expect them to and make you feel a little more alive.
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