It's a little after-the-fact, but I had a brief realization on New Year's Eve. For some reason New Year's Eve makes me sad. I think it's just the loss of the old year and the uncertainty of a new year. It's a very poignant, yet completely arbitrary, sign of impermanence in the world. 2010 is gone forever and now we get to see what 2011 is like for the next 365 days.
I have to admit that I am a science fiction fan, so I was one of the folks watching the Dr. Who marathon on BBC America. I did the same thing on Christmas, but that's another story. The combination of the new year and watching one of my new favorite shows led to an interesting thought/realization. Modern media, with all its fidelity and lack of generation loss upon copying, tends to obscure the truth of impermanence. Of course, physical media (i.e. DVD, CDs, etc.) still wear out like their older counterparts, but somewhere there is now a digital copy of just about everything preserved somewhere in such a way that it will not degrade in image or sound quality.
I'm not saying that these media defy the law of impermanence (see Anicca), because eventually the computers will crash, data will be corrupted, or the media will simply be forgotten. What occurred to me is that we can now watch the same thing over and over. If you have a favorite movie that you watch on a regular basis (holiday movies are a good example), you may be very surprised when you see a current image of one of the actors or hear that one of the actors has died. Due to repeated exposure to the same images we have a certain vision of what that person looked like and that they are alive. Thus, the person and actions captured on film tend to obscure our sense that time has passed...
...or, I may just be the only one. I do tend to watch a lot of the same things repeatedly.
