Recognizing The Good Old Days When They’re Now

How do you relish a period you will later look back on as the good old days? Hard to say. How do you even know you’re in one of those periods? Also challenging. I slyly interviewed some of the big thinkers in my circle (a music producer, a very clever writer, a professional artist) and here are the results.

To begin with, everyone agreed with my description of ‘the good old days’. There are periods, years long, that you look back on with relish. You might miss them, but as you get older that changes into ‘damn I’m glad I did that’ or ‘shit those were good years’, modified by time in that you realize you would no longer enjoy living in such a phase. It was time specific, or in tune with where you were in your allotted lifespan. Crazy days lived when you had crazy energy, etc. Everyone agreed that ‘the good old days’ last a minimum of two years, and they further agreed that the ‘bad times’ in between get shorter and less, well, bad. Bad periods, as you age, are punctuated with little snatches of brightness.

On to the answers. If you begin to think with uncommon frequency about the things you wholesomely enjoyed as a child, like comic books, horses, whatever, that positive nostalgia is a sign that you may be enjoying a period you will someday look back on fondly. The results of this Q-n-A are slanted because pretty much everyone I know is a ‘creative type’ (dork) but they all said that during the good old days of yore they dreamed (as in productive growth) a little bigger and a little more often. No giant leaps of creative scope came during these periods, just solid, well-conceptualized progress. A further slant- we’re all in what we’ll later think of as a ‘good’ period.

The most interesting thing to come from these discussions was what I’ll call ‘the pendulum effect’. It seems that people generally believe that the motion between these phases, the swinging of the pendulum between good and bad, is a dynamic force in life. That motion builds. What it builds no one could agree on. I personally believe that motion builds. Period.