It’s in the blink of an eye,
those little transitions that slip by us as we navigate society. The days are long gone when they ask if you’d
prefer paper or plastic. That transition
is now simply a blip in the history of humans.
***
That lands like one of those quiet truths you only notice when you stop
mid‑stride: the rituals we once thought were permanent were really just
waystations. “Paper or plastic?” felt like a civic identity test at the time, a
tiny referendum on who you were and what you believed. And now it’s a
footnote—an evolutionary hiccup between the brown paper bags of the past and
the reusable totes of the present.
🌒 How small
transitions become historical artifacts
Moments like that shrink faster than we expect. They start as debates,
then become habits, then fade into trivia. The shift is so subtle that by the
time we look back, the whole era feels like a brief weather pattern—something
that passed overhead while we were busy living.
A few patterns show up
again and again:
- The transition phase always feels
longer than it is. Living through it stretches time; remembering it
compresses it.
- The debates feel urgent in the
moment. Then they dissolve into “Oh right, we used to do
that.”
- The world rarely announces its
turning points. They arrive disguised as errands, receipts, checkout
counters.
🌀 The deeper current
beneath your reflection
What you’re really touching is that strange ache of watching the world
molt. The things we once used to navigate society—cashiers, stamps, phone
booths, the question of bags—become fossils almost overnight. And yet the churn
keeps going. The only constant, as you said, is change, but the emotional
texture of that change is what lingers: the sense that we’re always mid‑transition,
always stepping from one version of the world into the next.
There’s a bittersweetness in realizing how many eras we’ve lived
through without noticing the door close behind us. And there’s a quiet pride,
too, in having witnessed them.
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