This video of Jenson Button driving his championship-winning Formula One car on the Goodwood circuit is utterly fantastic. For many fans - myself included - this is the era of F1 we remember most fondly. The naturally-aspirated engines that revved to the moon. The hair-raising, high-pitched wail of a scream that is still the gold-standard of engine sounds. The sort of fizzy feeling that is utterly absent in today’s turbocharged hybrid formula.
Sad as it may be to say, Formula One is never going back to that era. Things have moved on, technologies have gone in a different direction.
Which is why it’s important to be in the present and to fully appreciate what’s right in front of us. Because in a few years things can change rapidly, and you’re left wondering why the “good ole days” seem to have passed us by so quickly. I wished I had paid more attention to Formula One before this current decade-plus turbocharged era. I would have savored the screaming engines that much more. The sheer beauty that was displayed on the television screen.
It’s mechanistically perverse that we really don’t know we are in the ‘‘good times” until it has passed and we are looking backwards. It would be nice to get some signal that right now is a golden era that we should probably pay full attention to. But then again, we do love to live in the future tense. We can’t even enjoy a concert of our favorite artist without recording the proceedings for posterity. For the future us.
A good way to practice being in the present moments is to go to the movies. You are stuck there for the two hours completely engrossed in what is displayed on the giant screen in front. No phones, no distractions. We’ve all experience that feeling, right? That moment when we come out of the theatre and time seems to return to normal ticking. As if inside the theatre was a dream world. It’s a strange feeling because when we are fully in the present moment, the flow of time feels different.
But it’s only strange because our regular lives are so consumed by ruing that past or anxious about the future. We either want to erase time, or speed up time. That’s not a great way to live, especially when the human lifespan has a finite hard stop.
Maybe the reason we’re so addicted to nostalgia is because it gives us a chance for a do-over at being present for the thing to be nostalgic about. Right then, I’ll go watch more old Formula One clips on YouTube.
Golden State.