You can find "Timeline" in my digital work. "Timeline" explains history in a visual way. On the left is the past and on the right is the future. Past and future are large but we live in the instant between past and future. This piece is my reaction to something I heard throughout my careers in television and newspapers. I was formed professionally when I was local television director in the 1950s. (Norfolk Virginia and Atlanta, Georgia) We might do two to five hours of local shows. Looking back, it wasn’t very good, but we did it without writers, often “back to back” local shows. We were setting up the next show while one was on the air. I couldn’t express it until later but I developed a philosophy, “Now just passed.” It wasn’t a forgetting of history but a recognition that whatever we were doing now was just that, what we were doing now.
After ten years of recently invented television, I moved to
newspapers. In television we began every day with, “What are we going to do
today!?” In long established
newspapers, new ideas were met with, “That’s not how we do it.” I heard an
implied “now” at the end of this. I used to annoy people with my “Now just
passed,” response.