Today I had a really great drink of sprite. I'm not usually into the clear fizzy beverages, but we had some pop left over from our party and so I decided to have some. We also had some lemons and limes sliced up which didn't get used either, and so I put a couple of limes and a lemon in the glass along with the sprite. (all of these surplus drink supplies mean that our keg was a big hit.... but that's another story!) You know, when I took a sip of that glass of pop, I didn't expect it to taste as good as it did. Damn! Fresh, flavourful and thirst quenching. Those actual lemons and limes made all the difference.
Our low-cost, mass production, blowout sale, fly from New York to London non-stop, this-week-only society has left a lot to be desired in the genuine department. Mass communications and the internet has apparently done a lot to bring us closer together, but I think that in many ways it made it easier for us to stay farther apart. What a great feeling it is to sit down with someone and have an actual beer from an actual glass in an actual bar, looking at their actual face. Drinking a cup of actual coffee made from freshly roasted and ground beans and served in an actual ceramic mug while reading a book that is actually properly bound in hardcover. Sharing an actual hug with someone and smelling their actual smell and feeling their actual warmth. What about taking a walk through an actual forest with actual trees and seeing actual living creatures making it their home. It's amazing the beauty of such simple and fundamental things.
It seems that in our superior modern society we have somehow, relinquished class and quality in exchange for now and cheap. And then we find ourselves in a low quality, disposable world where it is too easy to easy to eat our dinner with plastic forks, call our friends and tell them that we are too tired to see them, and become absorbed in a thin and transparent world of television and web pages and video games.
When people my age are old, what will we remember? The shape and decorations of our Windows(tm) desktop perhaps? Maybe we'll have fond memories of that one show we used to watch, or the smell of warm cardboard mixed with the chemicals in our favorite food. Will we remember how our friend felt when we gave them a big hug, or the details of their face and eyes, or the sound of their voice speaking directly to us, or will it all just be a vague memory? Maybe we'll remember the world as a bunch of professional photographs of places we never went, things we never got to experience directly. Perhaps beauty will remain something that can only be achieved with colour-corrected, touched-up photographs, even though chances are that the most beautiful places are right around the corner, and the most beautiful people are our best friends.
We live in a fake, processed and mass-produced world where we are chained to our televisions and computers and force fed food made from the extracted worst parts of the original ingredients. But we have a choice, if we care about life we can make a difference.
Touch, feel, go, love, experience, talk, listen, smile, look, connect, share, smell, taste and take a big breath of fresh air. And the next time you're at the grocery store, pick up a set of actual lemons and limes.