Then & Now

That was then & this is now.  Powerful, sometimes meaningless words.  They've been used to describe every type of situation we can get ourselves into that over time has changed in some fundamental way.  It really doesn't matter if the change was really all that earth shattering, only that it felt that way to us.  They tell us that hindsight is 20/20.  I don't think so.

I've found a blog site & contest, that has pictures of people repeating poses in pictures taken long ago.  It's a fun site, check it out.  Even though some of these people try very hard, the pictures are never the same.  Even if they could fit into the exact same clothes & find the right props & places, it wouldn't be the same.  That moment captured in the original picture is gone, for some, long gone.  Some of the props are lost, some of the places are now history themselves.  But, it is fun to pay homage to the past once in a while.

Back to the hindsight thing.  I used to tell myself if I could go & I would do this & that different.  Finally, I realized that there was very little I could change in my life that would seriously alter the outcome.  Maybe I wouldn't have become + when I did, but I might have at a later date.  Wishes & ought-to-be's can be really self-defeating & hurtful.  Like it or not this is the proverbial world we live in & time for that matter.  We just have to deal with all those cliche cards that have been dealt to us.

I've figured out five things I'd write to my past self if I could send my younger self a letter.  The first one would be to learn to let go.  I am a Virgo & I really hate change & I'm not to big a fan of surprises either.  There are so many times when I should've let go of the proverbial rope & trusted that I would land safely somewhere better.  This was the time in my life when I should've said, " I am a leaf on the wind, watch me soar."  Instead I clung to hells I knew fearing the ones I didn't.

Next, I would've told myself to have some faith.  Faith in myself mostly.  Faith in my judgment & my abilities.  I let too many others tell me I couldn't do things or that things would be too hard on me.  I later learned that I could do those things even if they weren't the easiest things in the world to do. I could've stayed in math when I was younger.  I could've got a slightly harder job to get me through.  There are simply too many I could haves to count.

Try a little harder would've been my next bit of advice,  I skated through life & school.  I never really tried at anything.  I'd never seen anyone in my life try to do anything except con people & take griping to an art form. I could've pushed & been a much better student, artist & yes a person.  I'm not trying put myself down, but I really have no idea what I could've done with my life, because I never really tried.

No is not such a bad word, would be my next nugget of self-directed wisdom.  I used to hate to hear the word "No".  I took it as a rejection, a judgement, a criticism...  All these negative things were invariably pointed my direction.  I hated to say no to people almost as much as I hated hearing it myself.  This got me in a lot of sticky situations.  I finally realized something about the word no, it was powerful & empowering.  It was liberating & sometimes quite kind.  There are times we should be told no & others when that no is actually a not now, but maybe later.

I have come to believe in the idea of bad luck being good & good luck being bad.  My talent for learning was actually not as much a blessing as I had thought it was when I was younger.  Because of it I never pushed myself.  Maybe if learning had been more difficult for me I would've valued it & my accomplishments a bit more.  Some people should not win the lottery, all that $ may seem like a blessing, but for many it will actually turn out to be far more of a burden. Luck or fortune are pretty ambivalent.  You may think you've just hit the jackpot, but you have no idea what's around the bin.  Fortune is largely in one's perspective & willingness to thankful.

The last thing I would tell myself is to hold on to myself & my dreams, but not to be afraid to let them change & grow as I did.  So many of us get stuck in these ideas we create for ourselves when were young, that we can't see that those are no longer our dreams.  That those goals were unrealistic or potentially even harmful.  Our dreams are alive & must grow with us or else they'll just hold us back in a time that no longer exists.  We can't be like the Carl from UP, our dreams must evolve.

That is the advice I would give my younger self if I could.  What would you tell your younger self?

Looking Back

Looking back is seldom a good thing.  Thanks to Google, you can type in an address & viola  there you are.  I've used this application on Google to look at places from my childhood & for the most part it was a rather disappointing trip down memory lane.

I looked at places I'd lived, there were a lot of them, my family moved a lot.  I looked at childhood haunts & old schools. All but a few held unwanted visages I for some reason went looking for via cyberspace.  Most of the places just looked small, so very small & unimportant.  How could these be the places that loomed so large in my memory?  Many were dingy & in need of some serious maintenance or a bulldozer.  That same bulldozer seemed to have found many of the places I went looking for on my venture.

I never cared much for the town I grew up in, but I could always same it was clean & rather attractive. That is no longer the case.  Now it's run down, neglected & nothing like what it had been.  Since I was a child many things had changed.  Walmart came to town & destroyed the downtown businesses.  McDonalds came & soon all the local drive-ins & little cafes fell to the wayside.  The old folks held onto a lot the older businesses, but as they passed so did those businesses.  Good bye to Woolsworth, Montgomery Wards, Belks, Ramsey's, BF Goodrich & all those local shops that made my hometown what it was.  So long to all kids hangouts like the places to park while out doing the drag on Friday night, the skating rink & others too vague to recall.

Now when I use Google to look at my hometown, it's just a cliche of a broken down little town that used to have some character.  Now it's just a statistic.  All that was grand in my memory remains only that, a memory. I may not have liked my hometown & I certainly would never have gone back to it, but it deserved better than this fate.  I'm sure that's what a lot of people think when they finally get around to looking back to that town they'd left in their rear view mirror years ago.  We may have wanted out, we have even cussed the place, but we never really expected it to be so devastated by time.

For those of you that haven't been to your hometown in a long time & have been considering going back or using Google to look at it, STOP.  That's right stop.  Once you go back or look on the net for images of your old town, you will have information you may not really have wanted.  You could wind up wishing you had just been content with the memories you had of your old places.  Instead you may end up stuck with nasty images that belong in some Faulkner novel.

There's no sense in looking back anyway.  Even if it looks exactly the same & the very same people are still there, it isn't the same.  You can't go back to what it was, because that place doesn't exist anymore.  Those people, those relationships, those dreams don't exist anymore.  Time may not be linear, but the way we live our lives is.  We live in a line progressing forward, downstream or however else you want to look at it.  Going backwards isn't an option.  Time to take a cue from a Beatles' song & let it be.

I Hate Waiting...

I hate waiting.  There are things in life you just can't rush; Christmas, Summer Time or how long it takes you to forget a bad first date.  Then there are instances like;  disappearing wait-staff, professors who refuse to grade  papers or some jerk too busy talking on his cell-phone to realize he's just made a line of traffic miss the light.  Those are the moments I hate.

Waiting just makes me feel like I'm slipping backwards and in my experience going backwards is rarely, if ever, a good thing.  I'll try not to talk to much about my past here, little good could come from it.  But my "mother" was an avid believer in the bottle and baby-sitters.  I'm amazed someone didn't turn her into child services much earlier than they did.  I knew when I heard the beginning of her spiel of lies that I'd be stuck somewhere for far to long waiting for the lush to come back and get me.  When was about eight or nine one sitter had this little bridge in her front yard crossing a ditch by the roadside.  I'd sit there, legs dangling off that bridge, listening to cars approach.  I got really good at discerning different types of cars.  I really hated it when another car the same make as my moms would drive near.  As much as I despised her, she was at least the hell I knew.  I knew I'd be stuck waiting at this stranger's house for hours, sometimes days.  To her, I was just a speck of an image that faded out of sight in her rear-view mirror.

Overall my life is better now than it was in the past.  Living in the now is a trick, perhaps even an art. I used to practice the what-if magic like a pro, still do sometimes.  What if I'd had different parents, made better choices or a host of other possibilities.  All that did was depress me and led me to the conclusion that there was very little in my life that I  could've changed that would've drastically improved anything.  That realization sucked!

I believe we are responsible for our actions.  I also believe that we are players on the proverbial stage and that stage was at least initially set by other people.  Our parents for better or worse chart the course of our early lives, often in ways we never even realized until later.  You have to make the best you can of what they decided to do and sometimes that leaves us with little to no good options.

Wishful thinking will only bring you down.  Even if it's not a great present, better to be here than in the past.  The past is irrevocably set, you can't change it, and it got you to where you are now.  At least in the now, you might have some shot of bettering yourself.  If you aren't happy where you are at, then stop and figure out what got you there.  Did your parents set you on this course, did some friend do you wrong or are you the villain in your own story?

Regardless, sometimes letting go & moving on is the best, hardest thing to do. First rule, you can never really change anyone else.  You don't have the right to change them.  If something needs changing, look at yourself and see what you can alter about yourself or your situation.  If there are things or people in your life life that need to go, then send them packing.  Sometimes it really is them and not you to blame for them being difficult.

Remember, in life, your forgiveness is privilege not a their right or your responsibility.  Demand honesty.  It's always better just to have the other shoe drop and just get it over with, instead of waiting in dread.  Never expect anything from people, even if they tell you to, that way if they do what they said you can be pleasantly surprised.  I know that isn't nice, but sometimes people just suck.  Keep in mind you are people too and sometimes you just suck as well.

So don't keep people waiting.  Do be honest. Remember your playing on someone else's stage as well as your own.  Try not to suck too badly.