You Never “Go Back”
I’ve noted it multiple times on my blogs, and it’s an important piece of who I am. What is it? The Past.
The past is the foundation of who you are today, but you can never revisit the past from the future and expect the same experience. Just like you cannot flock to a personality that made hearts go flippity flop way back when, and not note how much they have aged and changed today. Unless you recognize your own changes between youth and maturity.
A few days ago, I saw a video clip of David Cassidy from his younger years, and later life, and I realized that most of us capture the younger vision of our past and we enjoy living with those forgotten long-ago years. We oft find it impossible to put that young image next to the aged version and connect the two.
Why? We are not living with their history in our span of years, accepting their change at every season of life, whether it be theirs, or ours.
In a flip view, we seldom move into the future of our present world without wishing for the past to be alive. So, we re-visit it often. Savor the memories. Yearn for yesteryear. We want to buy that first car all over again. We collect mementos from days gone by and reflect the “good times”.
As someone recently noted to me, we sort of get stuck with the music of a certain time of our life and never move past it. On one hand, I’m totally okay with that. I like my music from the past. I know the words, melody, key’s, notes, artist, and the purpose of the song. Maybe it’s the simple happiness of knowing the groove our life and living. However, on the other hand, the new world of music is not in sync with who I have been happy becoming. Unless it connects to my past.
My bride and I both have memories of times, places and events that are different from each other, but in some reference, we are often alike. Part of that requires 45 years of knowing each other, and the experience of the passage of time together. Hand in hand, walking to those retiring years, we know the past of our separate lives but see their cross-connections. We don’t exactly enjoy the same background story, but we are close enough that it works for us. She’s more accepting of some newer trends than I, and I’m accepting some of my own. Somehow they blend together, and other times we each know when it’s not for the other to enjoy.
But we’re okay with this. We are creating our history together.
We love to re-visit the times and places of our past. I love to hear her stories of growing up, for the most part, just 5 miles away from me. We had the same family doctor, but never knew each other!
So. Maybe the key is to know your past, enjoy visiting it in light of the present, but never think you can return to those happy yesteryears. Just like we started creating new Thanksgiving memories yesterday, let’s just remember the important thing. Those good ol’ years? They only exist in our memories.