Captured in the cloud

Subject: 'Captured in the cloud'

It's often said that Christmas, whilst a happy time for the young is a sad time for the elderly. The young with their presents and Parties, the old with their memories, their aches pains and indigestion who reflect on the passing year and still more, the year ahead with questions rather than answers. The field of friends has become depleted this year. The phone calls or the Christmas cards not sent this year, already the frisson of rekindling a friendship over a phone call to someone who you had known and shared experiences with half a lifetime ago are now no more. The address book is becoming full of ghosts, addresses you had entered when you were young, people to look up in their new environment or country, people from your home town who had moved away and who might be at the quayside waiting as you were, to catch a first glimpse before being taken off and shown their new world. Now they are gone for ever like so much else, the laughter and excitement echoing down the years like a call to the good times when anything was possible and we counted our tomorrows as opportunities not to be squandered.  Now we see the road ahead with far less clarity as the old adages seem so pertinent and wise.
This is not to say that one is morose or melancholy since there is a certain probity in the passage of time between say your 70s and 80s, a certain 'I told you so' lesson you wouldn't accept when younger but which now, sometimes to late you may regret not having done what you might have done.
But it's hard to shake off the habits of a lifetime especially if their assumed truism marked you and were the strength of your conviction on so many things. Your abundance of surety, your willingness to argue your point and feel vindicated if you retained your ides of what was right or wrong. These ideas now jostle with new uncertainty as the life force which drove you on becomes more accommodated to the idea that, in the not too distant future your voice will be quiet and ones old fashioned thoughts and habits will seem irrelevant.
Perhaps that's it we are individually irrelevant in the greater scheme of things and the self indulgence we grant ourselves hides that irrelevance. Perhaps all we have is the impression we might have made the mark that we were once around, a mark made in the footprint of our children and their children and maybe, just maybe, thoughts made clear in a blog captured for posterity somewhere in 'the cloud'.