LIKE the Elysian transience of a fragrant sillage, the ethereal beauty of Japanese cherry blossoms has long stirred the hearts of poets.
One was Takijiro Onishi, the vice-admiral of the Japanese navy during World War 2. In October 1944, he wrote this haiku to inspire young kamikaze pilots on suicide missions: "In blossom today, then scattered.
Life is like a delicate flower. How can one expect the fragrance to last for ever?" Thanks to technology, life is constantly changing. Time moves in one direction, memories in another. There is a perception that if one reminisces about the good old days (and no one wants to go back there), then one must be getting old .
Notwithstanding, such reflections make us more aware of who we are and how life has ebbed and flowed.
Take the simple creature comfort of television to fathom how life has trundled along. Once pejoratively dubbed as the idiot box , the TV has now become smart and high definition. When I was growing up as a kampung boy, television shows were only black and white. It only had a couple of channels to watch.
Among the three dials on the TV, one controlled the brightness of the screen. There is a witty meme that has gone viral on social media that captures the essence of watching TV then. In a soccer match between England and Nigeria, if one were to increase the brightness of the set, the English players would disappear.
Darkening the screen would make the Nigerian players vanish! Although an exaggeration to a marked degree, it highlights the state of the fare that TV served us in the 60s. Today, TV is all colour and multi-channelled; it's a remote-control befuddlingly perplex!
Video and music-streaming services have added further pickings to the smorgasbord of entertainment. Netflix, Spotify, YouT ube and TikTok offer endless all-daylong amusement. Then, university education was in-person. Hastened by Covid-19, it is being delivered online now. Then, it was work in office. Now it is work from home!
Then, we had pen pals. Children nowadays have online friends. Harry Potter now enthralls children, replacing the excitement I used to get from the adventures of Enid Blyton's Famous Five. Those days, it was "early to bed, early to rise, makes you healthy and wise".
Children these days are sleep deprived — either doing their homework or using their digital devices late into the night. Research took us to the school library and to Encyclopaedia Britannica. Now, children look up about anything on the Internet from the comfort of their homes. Our spending habits, too, have changed.
While growing up, we had a narrow range of choices when it came to shoes. It was either Bata or Fung Keong. Now, branded footwear cry for the attention of the young and the old. Growing up, my mother ground spices on a stone mortar with an oblong stone pestle. Flour was pulverised on a wooden mortar with a long pestle. Now we hear the grrr sound of the electric grinder. What is more, food is instant these days — be they noodles or beverage.
Telecommunications, too, have changed. Those days, we shared our father's landline telephone. Today, every member of the family carries a handphone. Telex and telegraph of the days of yore have been substituted with short messaging through WhatsApp, Twitter and Telegram.
We bemoan our children's addiction to their handphones, yet when at their age, we were Tarzanlike, swinging on tree branches! Technological revolutions will continue to bring profound change to our daily lives.
Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher, once said: "The only thing that is constant is change." Rather than resist change, we should embrace it as an opportunity for growth and a normal part of life's journey.
Change is the ebb and flow of life itself. It calls out to us to stop, reassess and then move ahead. As with cherry blossoms, nothing lasts forever. Enjoy life's journey while it lasts!
The writer is the AIMST University vice-chancellor