27 January 2014
The frequent topic of change caught up with me a bit last week when my reaction to a news item stirred me into starting to write something to post on one of my other blogs.
Change is something that, for most of the time, I welcome. I think that possibly being a country boy might have something to do with it because for as long as I can remember the seasons were important. We needed time to move on so that we could plant, harvest and re-plant, rotating crops to keep the soil fresh.
We needed the passage of time, always looking to next year and the year after drove our planning, so we always thought ahead and looked forward to the way that the land and the garden changed. The signs we looked for in the weather, the soil, the animals and the plants are all still with me.
Through most of my working life change has also been important as the various organisations I worked for sought to gain an advantage, or at least keep up. I have been driving through change for years now and thrive on it for the most part, but I don't enjoy all change and that was where I found I was laughing at myself.
The news item was about a certain popular entertainer who has been consuming the oxygen of publicity of late with a barrage of news items about whether or not he has retired, but as that sequence has begun to pale he got himself back in the news by, allegedly, committing various driving offences down in Miami. Faced with a few minutes of forced inactivity, I was composing a barbed blog on his antics and paused to read my words.
Some of those close to me tell me that I am really stuck in the late 1960s, certainly in terms of music, and in reading what I had written regarding the Miami miscreant (co-incidentally he and I share initials) I found myself sounding very much like my father talking about the likes of the Rolling Stones 50-odd years ago: with a smile, I deleted what I had written.
Many of us don't like change and the good old days are preferable as we look back, but change we have to. In the same way that my generation sought to stamp our mark on our world to the despair of our elders, so must each generation in their turn. It has to be thus if we are to survive and prosper, and we have to keep moving forward. I still thrive on change, even if my musical tastes may not extend much past the 1980s. Bring it on!
John Bowen is an FM consultant
http://thatconsultantbloke.wordpress.com/