LIKE PATIENCE ON A MONUMENT

This describes the misery of Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. I‘m not miserable just mildly frustrated that we seem unable nowadays to be patient and wait to see how “things play out.” In a world of instant opinion and overcrowded media, waiting, watching and thinking is seldom the way we behave. It’s a world of yes and no not maybe, yet “maybe” is the seldom used but most useful state to be in when not all the information needed to make a decision is available.

Truth is not an absolute. My truth and your truth will be different. This is what makes it tricky trying to understand where, for instance, the war in the Ukraine will end.

But what we can do is mentally assemble the chess pieces and try to see the likely way they’ll move. I’m wondering how the 34 million of Russians 15 -35 years old  are feeling and whether the reported migration of youth from the country represents a real trend.

As we’ve recently just seen in Iran and China youth can help change politics, even in these most autocratic regimes. I suspect how this plays out may be the most significant factor in the removal of and selection of a successor to Putin. I had a conversation with a wise man I’ve known for many years saying I thought this would play out sooner if the Russian military failure deepened. He delved back into history and foresaw a five-year struggle. Rather than fight over who’s right we’re both thinking about it. 

My thinking is that increasingly the young will influence the world and push things in specific directions, helping them “play out” favourably in creating a world in which they’ll be more comfortable. A greener world. A fairer world. A less aggressive world. A world where constant travel and sharing of ideas in a norm. A world of creativity and innovation.

This is not always going to be world I readily and constantly understand but it was ever thus. As a friend said to me recently “you were opinionated and radical once too.” I belonged to a coal-mining world where supermarkets and new restaurants were a novelty. A world where the cold war was the norm and every -ism you can imagine existed and was tolerated. 

This world today is a much better one and the abolition of obscenities like capital and corporal punishment are things we drove away with influential musicals like “Hang down your head and die” and “Oh what a lovely War” -  the products of young minds. Just as the world today is being steadily shaped by new generations.

Social media has taken a bashing recently but not wholly deservedly. Ideas, events and jokes are widely and quickly shared. Big players like Facebook and Snapchat are declining and being usurped by TikTok and We Chat and  new unheard of platforms. Innovation, novelty and surprise are increasingly the currencies that score. 

Qatar is a famous place now despite many misgivings, but I wonder if the rulers there quite understand what trends could play out there going forward now the toothpaste has left the tube...and other metaphors like this which should be banned...sorry.

But social media has made many of us impatient. We live in a world of trending news. But how we deal with that is up to us. Too much choice doesn’t mean we have to choose everything.

In a world of quite surprisingly violent change  we need patiently to watch and think how things may play out. This is history unfolding, it’s not a race.