Have you ever looked back over the past and realized how much has changed in your lifetime? When Dear Husband and I traveled, we used to have a conversation about how the world would change in our lifetime. My grandfather was born in the time when travel was by horse and buggy. He died shortly after the U.S. put men into space, and travel by air was commonplace. Television existed by the time I was born, and we’ve lived to see the boom in Internet communication. We think that miniaturization will be one of the major accomplishments of our generation, as in nanotechnology.

I was thinking about change in smaller ways, though. I had a dentist appointment last week. The dentist wanted to be sure I was working with my brush correctly and took the time to do a demonstration. When I was a kid, your mother put toothpaste on your toothbrush, handed it to you and said, “Brush!” She didn’t say how to brush, so of course we all brushed from side to side. Now the correct way to brush is to bury your toothbrush into the junction between gums and teeth and brush toward the ends of your teeth. That’s a pretty remarkable change.
Another change that is astounding is that children have special seats in the car, and they all sit in the back, or middle seats. Perhaps the fact that cars were made of steel when I was a kid made the difference in where they sat, and whether they were restrained. Now that our cars are mostly plastic, they need to be situated where they will be least likely to be hurt. It has to be difficult for a mother to drive while her child is not where she can see him at all times.
And….babies were laid to sleep on their backs way back then. Someone came along and said that was bad, so babies were put to bed on their tummies. Now it seems that they should have been on their backs all along! My Mother wants to know how all of her children managed to grow to be healthy adults, considering all the stuff they didn’t know about child raising then.
Washing hands is another example. Did you know that we are supposed to wash our hands for a full two minutes each time we wash? My skin is so dry now, I’d need two more minutes to slather on lotion every time I washed my hands. If I wash my hands 10 times a day, there goes FORTY minutes down the drain. And we used to feel virtuous if we rinsed our hands and shook the water off. What I don’t understand is, why do we spend so much time washing our hands in public places and then touching levers to dispense paper towel, or door handles that probablycarry common germs. Seems like they need to rethink that.
Our diet is changing. The food pyramid is being rethought. Carbs used to be the fair haired members of meals, and now anything low-carb is in. So we have an entire generation, or two, who are addicted to potatoes, rice, pasta, and corn, who have to rethink how they eat.
These are just small ways our lives have changed. Perhaps more disturbing is to find that Einstein’s theory of relativity is being challenged. Perhaps he only pointed us in the right direction, and the rest of it needs to be thrashed out.
Change is inevitable. Although there are days that I resist it, I think that for the most part, change is healthy. If we don’t grow and adjust and adapt we stagnate. Personally, I’d rather be reaching for the stars than livng in the days of horse and buggy travel.