All These Changes, they Never Stop!

Today is my birthday. I’m 44.  To celebrate, I came to Rio for a few days.  I have never been Rio. It was one of the places on my bucket list.

Like anytime I visit a new place, I have to check out all the big tourist spots.  In Rio that is the Cristo Redentor or, as I like to call him, the “Big Jesus.”  The Big Jesus is a giant statue of Jesus that sits on a mountain top looking down at the city.  It was pretty cool.  The view of the city from up there was astonishing. It was absolutely beautiful.

Being a such a tourist attraction, it was packed with visitors taking pictures. What was absolutely conspicuous was the amount of people taking pictures with their mobile phones, me included. (I took this picture with my Iphone) I would say almost half, if not more, of the people were taking their precious vacation pictures with their mobile phones. Only, four years ago, on my 40th birthday, this was inconceivable.

The pace of technology is amazing. However, even more interesting to me is our adoption and use of technology. Growing up in the 70’s, there was film, flashes, and Kodak was a big , successful company.  We printed our pictures at little Kiosks in the parking lot of the grocery store. We didn’t get to see the pictures of our vacation until we got home and took them to the kiosk. Our phones were big, bulky contraptions that sat on a wall or on a little desk in the hallway, attached to the wall by a cord.

Today, our phone IS our camera and our camera is our phone. Even more compelling, we trust our precious vacation memories to the thing we call our friends and family on.

It’s amazing to me how and what we do today, that we didn’t do when I was a kid, when I was in high-school, in college, in my first job, and even when I turned 40, just four years ago.

To my kids these aren’t changes, it’s all they know.  But, as they get to 40, they will see things as I am today, and be astonished with the changes. Getting older gives us perspective, we see changes come and go. We see the new get old and the old disappear and we see things that didn’t exist born.

Change happens, I saw it vividly while standing at the feet of the Big Jesus!

Keenan