It's funny what we sometime remember.
Maybe it's because I am spending more time than usual doing things at home and recently was looking at old photo albums, but one of the old memories that has surfaced for me is of one of my Auntie's unusual traits or "Gifts:" Predicting the future.
My Aunt Ulla in Denmark helped raise me; I would go stay with her on quite a few occasions when my parents were off gallivanting around the world and decided it would be best for me to stay back in Denmark.
I have always been grateful to my aunt for providing one of the very few solid "anchor points" of my upbringing... everything else seemed so scattered and unpredictable.
Looking Into the Future
Ulla was a remarkable woman; she passed away at age 94, in late 1998. She was one of Denmark's first female executives and held a number of patents in the area of "materials reclamation" (a WWII term for "recycling") and as a kid I loved the fact that she just knew so much stuff about so many things.
Anyway, one of her "gifts" was a fairly remarkable ability to "see into the future."
Some might have argued that she was psychic, but I come from a very methodical and scientific family, and the most anyone "allowed" was to say that she had a remarkable ability to "see over the horizon."
She pretty much stopped working in the years immediately following World War II, and used her talent for "seeing into the future" to become an uncannily successful investor in the Danish stock market.
NOT a Fortune Teller
Now, I should hasten to add that my Auntie was by no means what you might call a "fortune teller." She had no interest in predicting when someone might get married, or whether it would be sunny on the weekend... what she predicted was trends in the world; in society. Not all of these came true during her lifetime, although many did.
I remember being fascinated — as about an 8-year old (1968) — by her assertion that in another 30 years every person on the planet would have "their own portable mini television the size of a cigarette case that would connect them to 1000's of programs wirelessly, at the touch of a button." She missed by a decade or so, but smartphones, anyone?
She predicted (early 1970's) that money and banks as we knew them then would go away and be replaced with "electronic passbooks" that belonged to people, not banks... and such notions as "foreign currency" would become obsolete. Not exactly cryptocurrencies, but the idea is there.
She felt all cars would be electric by 2025, and people would just plug in in their garage (sort of a "hit") and the cars would be able to go "to Switzerland and back" (from Denmark) on a single charge (1300 miles... definitely a "miss").
She made many such "forecasts," made perhaps more remarkable by the fact that she was not a science fiction reader, but just tuned into whatever information she could glean that would allow her to pick stock market winners.
Part of made me think of my Auntie's predictive powers was one thing she observed that seems particularly poignant at the moment: In spite of everyone talking about growth and prosperity in the 1980's, she felt (having lived through the first one) that we would have "another Great Depression about 100 years after the first one, because people get greedy and forget their history."
Seems to me we might get there 10 years early, on that one...
Anyway, don't want to get too long-winded here but I remember it being fascinating to listen to this already elderly woman "reason through" her explanations... and so often be right.
Thanks for reading!
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Created at 20200329 01:02 PDT
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History may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.
Fascinating to read your post and what a wonderful insightful woman your Aunt was. Thank you for sharing this. Stay well
When somebody close to you is lost, you feel their absence