When I was growing up, I used to find it odd when my Gran would talk about “the good old days”. To my adolescent ears, it sounded like she was harping on about a primitive era. With hindsight, I realise that she was probably just reminiscing about times gone by. It also strikes me as intriguing now that she may have viewed post-war Ireland as better than the “brave new world” of the early ’80’s under Thatcher.
All of us like to look back from time to time. I sometimes wonder whether we will lose the tinge of nostalgia conjured up from old photo albums in an age where we increasingly store our images in digital archives? When I do stumble across old photos, they often make me smile. Moments captured forever – immortalised somehow. In my mind’s eye, I may have photo-shopped the finer detail or edited out some of the past. The soundtrack in my head that accompanied my teenage years only has the cool songs. Surely, the temporary musical and fashion glitches influenced by trying to impress some girls that my mate Euan and I fancied never really happened…
I can recall those early teenage years steeped in copies of BMX Action Bike and wanting to be older than my years – somehow yearning for that coming of age or rite of passage. Any notion of “living in the now” seems intrinsically linked to the irony of Wayne’s World and the vocabulary that infiltrated our lingo at the time of those films. Desperately uncool as it may be, the sentiment of one time skate-influenced band, Jesus Jones, still kinda rings true for me all these years on.
I came upon a great couple of sentences in a book I was reading the other night. “Listen to your life: to its passion, its dreams and disappointments, its tedium aswell as its drama. It came to you as a gift and each day, too, unravels as a gift”.
It’s easy to live in the past – either in fond memories or full of regrets or questions over what might have been. It’s easy to dream about the future – a time when certain more immediate deadlines or conflicts or issues are resolved. But, just maybe, the secret is to live in the present and to willingly soak it up and live it to the full? This moment is all that is certain. In doing that we create memories that we can fondly look back on.
I stumbled upon some video footage the other week. I remember these two little snippets of Livi’ Skate Park being on the telly in the 80’s. In fact, the news coverage of the Bones Brigade visit in 1987 rekindled so many memories of bunking off school on the last day of term to get the train from Aberdeen, of hooking up with the Dundee Hardcore Skate Squad on the way down, of the folly of youth, the throng of skaters sessioning the Almondvale Centre Mall on the way to the skate park and trying to avoid the security guards, the excitement of skating Livi and of seeing some of our heroes shred it up right in front of our eyes. Those were the days when our Converse Allstars were more colourful, our hair styles more interesting and our clothing more florescent…good times!
Now let’s get out there and create some more memories whilst we’ve got the time…
soul surfers 