The past week or so has been a time of quiet reflection for me, as nearly everything apart from “essential businesses” is still closed and, apart from work, I’ve been home-bound. While this imposed isolation has been emotionally trying at times, my cabin fever has subsided for the time being, and I’ve been focused lately on nostalgia and old memories with friends, bygone events and eras in my life where things were markedly different than they are presently. I’ve spoken to a few of my close friends I share such experiences with, on the phone or via social media, and it’s been nice strolling down memory lane for the most part.
People have come and gone, and come back and gone again throughout the decades (such is life). Its bitter sweet sometimes, other times it’s a welcome change of pace. I’m not a sickly-thin teenager reeling with angst anymore, nor am I a brazen twenty-something frustrated with life: I’m thirty. I have a stable career, a wife, a child, a home, and my life is relatively stable. I’ve made a pleasant life for myself and my family. Will I play Dungeons and Dragons again? Will my brother, our friends and I get together weekly to play Warhammer 40,000 tabletop games again? Will I climb trees with Bobby and Chester and eat plums and play games with toy guns and stay up all night eating snacks and drinking Surge ever again? Things change. A man crosses a river, they say, but he can never go back because it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.
As sad as these realizations make me at times, the facts that none of these things will likely ever happen again, it wouldn’t be the same if they did. What I am most fond of is not material wealth or possessions, but experience and memories, and I hold each one, even the bitterest of them dearly, because every one of these past events played a role in my present happiness and stability.
I’m grateful for so much.
If you asked me a few years ago, or even twenty years ago where I thought I’d wind up by thirty, I’d have told you that I didn’t plan on living that long.
I’m glad I did.
Towers of Rust 