Old is the new "new," as if something of age was meant to be reborn or reproduced. What the past is to us is what the present is to the past. A means of living that expresses the hopeful need of a future not yet lived. Back then, the eternal phrase of dissonance, what we find out of style or outdated was natural living at that point in time. The past we look back at was once the present day. It is a miracle that our gaze can be so scrutinizing enough to see farther than the future allows us. Unless it is to be forgotten, misplaced, redacted, or revised, history will show its punctual and preeminent watershed epochs, even if it means rinsing and repeating. It all depends on whose washing the plates.
Some people do their washing with bare hands, using the dish detergent and sponge as their tools to preserve the sheen and service of the porcelain. Some people prefer their excavations with the clinical reassurance of rubber household gloves. Some people leave the discovery to the automation of the dishwasher, never knowing a dirty plate from a clean one.
No matter how we clean, to know the meals that touched such china cannot be savored exactly as they were prepared. The closest we get to tasting the past is through how we intend to eat off these plates.
A feast for the senses is considered an understatement to the Roaring Twenties when compared to the Digital Age of Debauchery. The amount of excess from then until now has held this as habit, which turned it from vice to virtue to finally of value. The more, the merrier, but more of what made you happier?
Carefree innocence, childhood freedoms, and overall indulgence are practices that had their place but can never be the same again. That is not to say it cannot surface ever again; these half-full feelings quickly become half-empty in different ways, time and time again, especially in a dissatisfying sameness that claims to be new or perpetually updated.
Escaping history is out of turn. To escape history's faults is to deny its faults. Embracing history is acknowledging that it exists and is existing. History was and is still history with and without proper record. When memory is not enough, history persists in our dialogues, documentation, and most routinely in our debuts.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono were the pronounced images of hipster culture. Their message of peace was not mass-produced in factories or stores or sold at any monetary value. They possessed true values that transcended the hipster label and commercialism in a capitalistic sense.
Since the counterculture movement of the sixties, the resurgence, more appropriately a poor remnant of it, is found today in ironic fashion and lifestyle choices. The problem with bringing back the past is not always a subtle recurrence.
The assumption is that wearing spectacles larger than your forehead and a matching fedora a size slightly too small is worn for ironic effect, to sport an image that is supposed to reinvent the hipster label and lifestyle. Then you learn people who dress this way consider it a fashion.
All purpose and sincerity of what the term "hipster" represented is now rehashed in a way that masks the wearer's reputation and intention before it is made.
Of course, these superficial and artificial judgments will not taint the pores of an individual who upholds core values.
Someone who has an upkeep of honest character will not have to flout or tout any superiority or justification. This individual is well-adjusted in the sense that his or her confidences are not made out of inflated pride but of a meek, middling, discerning disposition. This person is an old soul.
An old soul is someone who is not popular and deserves to be but accepts the role he or she plays to make the part fix the whole.
