The Old Days are Gone

Nostalgia is a feeling I've always struggled with. Other people seem to love it, as is evident by the alarming number of people wearing 90's Nickelodeon shirts and the middle-aged professionals proudly proclaiming their status as 'Disney Adults'. But its a gross feeling to me. When my mind wanders on a road trip and something reminds me of 'back then', I get squirmy and start anxiously twisting my fingers into the rubber of the steering wheel; it's like the last step in the line of compulsive coping mechanisms before you eat your hair. I have loads of good memories to be sure, but that's part of the problem. See, as a kid we moved... all the fucking time.

I was born in California, moved to West Virginia, then Tennesee, back to California, then to the cornfields of Illinois, then back to California... and with all of the changes in houses and cities within those states, I had lived in 20 different houses by the time I was 16. I got really good at letting things go. At 10 years old I remember the last day of school, where we had a pizza party and a giant 100' slip n slide... I had friends there in a way I hadn't before. I talked to kids at lunch, had sleepovers, felt a bit normal. That party was just a good time... a good normal time. Knowing we had a move across the country in a week, I left the party soaked from the slide, running to my mom's car and and gleefully yelling back to my friends, "have a great summer, I'll never see you again!". I thought it was funny, in a 'what can you do but laugh at it' kind of way

All of these for me are the awareness of a hundred other lives that were started just to be abandoned. Getting a call that my art project won an award a month after I left the state (I never won an award before, I bet the exhibit was nice). Getting invited to my first high school party only to be on the I-10 in a Uhaul the next day. I can't think of any fond memory from any of those places without being rattled by the abrubt end. It's like a really great song coming on the radio only to stop dead in the middle of the chorus: "Baaaaby, I compare you to a kiss from a WE INTERRUPT THIS BROADCAST FOR A VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE".

I want to know who I would've been if any of those story threads had been followed through on. I want to hear the rest of that song play through.There's a reason a lot of my posts have to do with time (note Heidegger popping up). I was stopped cold when I first heard that summary of life's problems: unlimited options with the ability to only choose one, resulting in "a debt to yourself you can never repay,". The cost of every decision, which comes at the expense of every other path you could have explored, is a debt to yourself you can't repay. As Michael Sugrue put it, "may i suggest this is the echo of original sin when it gets de-theologized." The debt you can't repay. As a long time atheist, this gave me fucking pause

The Hallmark cliche that's been beaten into the ground, "you only get one life", took on a much deeper meaning after going down this rabbit hole. Where most take it to mean, 'you don't get to do this over so do it right', the better interpretation is 'you can't do it right'. Your perfect life is back there, at a fork you already passed, at the end of an infinitely long string of decisions you wouldn't have ever made in the correct sequence.... and even if you did, your flawed human brain wouldn't be able to cope with the idea that 'this is perfection' and you would ruin the gift by thinking on what the other paths could have given you... much like I'm doing right now.

I'm writing this in my office early morning, window open to let in the tinny tap of rain drops. There's cold air from the a/c on my left, hot fresh coffee in front of me, and the warmth of a passing thunderstorm outside the screen to my right. My wife just brought in our 4 month old son, as she does every morning when he wakes, to greet me with his relaxed, sleepy smile. Given the beauty of the present moment, which has never been owed or promised, what justice is there in ruminating over the jagged seams that mark me where my past, other lives were pulled away? Without those strings still attached to me, what space would there be for what is now?

Life is a river (fuck me). Seriously, it's a river that's big, violent and running in exactly one direction. We're on a dinky rented kayak with nothing more to guide us than an undersized paddle and a fear of drowning. The best strategy is to move towards the horizon when the current allows and to accommodate when it doesn't. And during a patch of calm in the environment, where our basic competence might afford us a rare stretch to be upright and unexhausted... be grateful. The better path was almost certainly back there, but we're here now.

Train. With Purpose.