Randolph The Internet has a long memory and my blog is 17 years old. That said, my website has been around in various forms for over 23 years so it’s not like I don’t have a wealth of content to be embarrassed by.
Reading old posts has reminded me, often in excruciating detail, of who I was back then. I remember in some cases crafting the HTML that formed certain posts. The house I lived in. The relationships I was in. What I was feeling. Smells. Music. You get the idea.
There’s a risk of falling into a nostalgic depression of what might have been. It helps, then, to remember that I am not the same person I was in 2002. Heck, I wasn’t the same person I was five years ago.
I and my spouse will have been living in Canada for nine years next month. I spent five years in high school and my memory of that time looms larger than the last five years.
I am not my own self from 1994. When I look in the mirror I see a human being with greying temples and wrinkles that can no longer be convincingly described as laugh lines. I have friends and family who have made their own families, seemingly overnight.
While it isn’t 100% perfect, my prodigious memory means I sometimes find myself stuck in the past, wondering what might have been had I taken a different path.
Instead of ruminating on that, I should channel those thoughts into scripts or books or jokes that will help me here in February 2019. I should use that memory to remember to pack the dishwasher or fold laundry instead.
It’s February 2019! The 21st century is almost two decades old. I was a dumb kid, and even a dumb adult, even this week I do dumb things. The trick is to learn from those things, appreciate what you have, be grateful for successes large and small, and to express that gratitude to the people around you.
Thank you to my husband who makes this all possible. Thank you to my friends who have come and gone over the years (I’ve known one of them since 1987). Thank you to my family, who even though they may be growing more and more distant as we get on with our respective lives in different countries, can band together in the ups and downs of shared experiences for a brief moment, and convey with a look or a few words what no one else can understand.
And out of left field, thank you to the guy who found an old working Apple computer in his parents’ attic this last week, because it prompted me to find an emulator for the console system I had in the early 1980s. The grin on my face when a piece of computing history came to life for a few brief minutes proved that nostalgia doesn’t have to be depressing.
I’m grateful for what I have achieved, for what I have learned, and for who I am, even though I have no idea what that is or what I’m going to do with my life.
Let’s see what happens.