Hunt: Changes keep coming; we have to be ready

A friend advised a somewhat younger man, “There is a big difference 60 and 68 years old. You don’t understand that now, but you will.”

Everyone I have known who has had a baby thought they knew what it was going to be like to care for an infant, but they were surprised. Is there anyone who has not been surprised by marriage? This includes couples who have lived together prior to the wedding and people who have been married before (and, therefore, surprised before).

We are extremely poor at anticipating what new situations will be like. I don’t know why we are put together the way we are.

Life is like a maze with lots of dead ends and barriers. We have to back up and try another route. We are not moving along an interstate highway with reliable signs and rest stops all along the way.

The disturbing feature of modern life is how much faster change is coming than it used to. Always in history changes came a different rates depending on the situation. A nation or empire could bump along for generations, and then in a short time period come unraveled. Individual lives have the same uneven pattern.

Now, however, everything is changing so fast that it is hard to make those U-turns and adjustments quickly enough to deal with the situation. College students will speak of younger siblings as if they were of an entirely different generation, and in a sense they are.

Some of our reactions do not serve us well. The desire to go back to some earlier time and implement the policies and procedures in force then will not work. We can certainly be informed by the past, but imagining that we can live as we did when the population was a third of what it is now cannot work very well.

The Amish have experience with freezing time. They are living somewhat like my great-grandparents. But even they want the benefits of modern medical care that has been developed completely outside their culture and systems. Even though they are pacifists, the military capacities of the 21st century, not the 19^th, are around them. Not many of us want to live as they do, so the political solutions from the time that their way of life was common will not work.

Pigheaded dedication to the status quo also will not work. We are not going to be able to solve our problems by clinging to the way we provide medical care, supply energy, or organize work, education and family life. But since we are bad at anticipating the consequences of necessary changes, we are trapped by our limitations.

Keeping all this in mind during an election year is even harder than in less politically charged times. What can we do? First, we need to realize that our situation is as difficult as it feels and quit imagining that this plan or that politician or technological quick fix will do the trick. There is no trick. Second, we need to live with less clinging to the way things are right now, which is tough because we do need stability. The third thing we need to do is to be inventive as we hit dead ends; the future cannot be a recreation of the past but has to have new solutions.

All three of these are hard for me in both my personal and political life. I am a grown-up, so why do I want to believe in the savior president or the easy fix? Why do I cling to things as they are? Or, on bad days, why do I want to believe that nothing can be done to make things better so I am excused from trying? I keep hearing politicians (and advertisers) trying to appeal to my inner 10-year-old who is alternately naïve and petulant. I hope the founders who trusted us Americans to be able to pull off democracy didn’t overestimate my maturity.