Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to experience an event that led to such a strong element of our culture for the first time. Not just what it would be like for me personally to see something that has happened before for my first time, but something that is happening for the first time ever.
For example, I wonder what it would be like to watch the first major league baseball game. I'm a big baseball fan and I can just imagine the feeling of hearing the ball connect with the wood of the bat, letting off a loud crack as it soars into the outfield and smacks into the leather of the center fielder's glove for the first time ever in a large crowd full of newcomers. Baseball is such a significant element of American culture, especially because I am from a major baseball town. If there is one thing that can be known for sure about St. Louisans, it is that we love our Cardinals baseball. Baseball is an important part of life in St. Louis, especially because we no longer have a football team. (Side note: the Rams left us for Los Angeles and they still aren't doing very well. I guess they learned the hard way that if you're not hot in Missouri, you sure aren't going to be hot in LA).
Something else that I would love to experience for the first time is the first motion picture. I'm sure you've heard the tale of how the first movie was of a train coming into station and the audience was so frightened by the realism, that they ran screaming from the theater. That's not true, by the way. As the people of today, we like to think that the people of the past were not that bright, however they understood that the train was not actually coming for them. Real fear or not, that would still be an amazing thing to see. Regular photographs were invented years and years before the first movie, which was release in 1896 by the Lumiere brothers, so being able to see people in motion on a two dimensional screen would be shocking to see. And then, they added sound to these motion pictures and then actual speaking. It must have been fantastic absorbing this new element of our culture for the first time.
Something else I would love to experience again for myself would be the first time I read a book or watched a movie that I absolutely loved, like the "Harry Potter" book series or the movies. I can never get those experiences back and sometimes I wish I truly knew how to appreciate them to their full extent. Nowadays, we have the option to experience new things every day and it's so easy to find these experiences that we don't really appreciate what we have access to. We so casually type on laptops that weigh so little that we can hold them with one hand without a struggle, we get on the internet in seconds to look up some random useless information, we drive anywhere and everywhere across the country because we want to see something and this traveling is so much easier than it used to be.
The world we live in today is amazing and underappreciated; every day we could be experiencing something that may go down in history and not even know it. I guess my point is, appreciate everything good and even normal that happens in our life because you never know if the world is handing you an amazing experience.
