Back To The Future Day

No matter what, the future always seems to get here faster than we think it will. When I was in fourth grade in 1970 I remember going to the school book fair where a local book store had set up tables with lots of books that were age appropriate that we could buy. One title intrigued me, 1984, so I bought it. My teacher told me that I would be out of college by 1984. I am certain I hardly knew what college was when I was in fourth grade and I certainly could not have imagined what the world would be like in 1984.

The ideas about “big brother” that George Orwell wrote about in 1949 were still very futuristic to me as a ten year old in the early seventies. People were calling for “free love” and shunning big government in response to Vietnam so the world of 1984 seemed very far away. George Orwell might have gotten the timing slightly off, but the idea that we are being watched has certainly come true. How many times are you surfing the web and an ad for the very shoes you looked at the day before comes up in the sidebar. Thank you George Orwell.

Today is the day that Marty McFly from Back to the Future II put in the time machine to go forward from 1989. When Marty arrived in the DeLorean in 2015 he found kids riding on hover boards, well we don’t exactly have them, but it’s close, big screen TV and video conferencing, got that, drones, yes, video glasses, kinda, I hear Google Glasses are being redone. There are probably more things I don’t remember, it was 26 years ago. But I can remember watching the movie and thinking, 2015 is a world away. Well, it really wasn’t.

I wonder how many of these things that were predicted in movies and literature were developed because someone was just producing someone else’s original idea. It is hard to judge. The one thing I do know is that the future is getting here before we know it. No matter how long away something sounds, when it rolls around it feels like the blink of an eye.

This is not news to anyone, but it should be a warning to not wait around for the future to do something you want to do because before you know the future will be here. The last thing you want is to look back at the years and say, “I wish I had sooner.”

Consider this your starting whistle to get to work on the dream you have been putting off. Whatever you want to accomplish can happen, it did in 1984 and Back to the Future. They may be fiction, but look how often fiction becomes reality. So take the fictional story you have in your head and make it your reality.