Drooling for the Past
by Miki Saxon
Oh, to be a teenager again and know everything.
Or twenty-something in a first job with the sure knowledge that if we were the boss everything would run perfectly.
Or able to quit when bored or annoyed because there is no mortgage, kids, spouse-or-equivalent; no responsibility for anyone else and able to move back home if necessary.
We often look back and wonder why, why we changed, what went wrong.
We blame ourselves and forget that our world changed, too.
Sometimes those changes are bad, often they are good and more often they are a just a function of shifting priorities over time.
We forget that the world itself changed and too often we minimize the effect of those external changes if they don’t hit us directly.
We tend to forget that we are no longer the same person; that who we are today not only doesn’t do the same things as our past self, but, upon close inspection, doesn’t even want to do them.
Would you really give up who you are today? Because doing so means giving up all the experiences and relationships that shaped the current you.
It seems smarter to change the specifics with which you are dissatisfied and to do so with surgical precision, after all, if your finger were broken you wouldn’t amputate your arm.
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/trainor/466111239/in/photostream/
