Growing up I distinctly remember Alan Parsons Project and their classic ballad Time. The lyrics that start the song say:
“Time flowing like a river, Time beckoning me; Who knows when we shall meet again, if ever; But time keeps flowing like a river to the sea.”
I was reminded of this ballad this weekend when I went on a college visit with my amazing daughter to my Alma Mater, the wonderful Ohio University. To say I was geeked would not be a good enough word !! I wanted to show her everything that I remembered. The classrooms, College Green, West Green, the Convocation Center – just everything. As I pulled in I was captured in my memories, but some things looked different. I shouldn’t have been surprised having graduated back in 1986, things would have to change, but it still surprised me.
The architecture was the same. The beauty of the mature trees was still there, but there were new things. Really cool things like the amazing Baker University Center. The new features on campus really did make it better and, even though is altered my memory of the past, I liked the new additions and even wished that some of them had been around when I went to OU.
Oddly enough, it reminded me of work places today and how HR likes to hold onto the past. We are notorious for it. We come up with an amazing Performance Review system that we did back in 1986 and we wonder why people think it’s stale today. You can pick almost any area of HR and it seems that practitioners lag in moving things forward. What we don’t realize is that the business environment will change around us whether we want it to or not.
So, we can embrace the new environment, or better yet, we can stay on the leading edge and create it !! Time will keep flowing either way.
This college visit opened my eyes to two things – (1) My family gets to enter a new and exciting stage with our oldest child entering a new phase of her own and (2) the past is great, but the future is so much brighter !!
She hasn’t chosen her college yet, but she has enough Bobcat paraphernalia to give her a daily hint . . . Oh, yes, one other thing. I did manage to pick up some new tye-dye because some things from my OU past still are current !!
