A Quick Revisiting of Childish Things...

Have you ever had a possession or a thought of some sort that you packed away, either into the back recesses of your mind or into the back of your closet? Something you felt could never lose its worth because it had to be priceless? It created a feeling that printed a memory onto your very psyche. Then you dig that “one thing” out of hibernation one day only to find that all those feelings and attributes placed onto the item were nowhere to be found.

For example, I absolutely loved the movie “Bridget Jones's Dairy”. There was a point in my young adult life that I felt her fictional story was my looking glass into my forthcoming future. What could be better than getting drunk with friends, making a complete fool of yourself and then telling the world to sod off if you’re not their cup of tea? And to find a man that “likes you just the way you are”?

Yep, that was going to be my future as far as I was concerned. And now looking back I see I couldn’t have been more wrong about all of it. Granted, I found the man that accepts and loves me for me, and I had so much fun before finding the love of my life. However, at that pivotal point of Jeff and I meeting, everything that Bridget Jones and I had in common began to slowly cease to exist. I quickly became too busy building who I wanted to become to compare myself to anyone.

Years later I nostalgically rented “Bridget Jones's Dairy” for one of my and my husband’s date-nights in. I remember I still laughed at the parts that were funny and found the story as cute as ever, but it no longer held the aura I found so enticing in my youth. I didn’t want her life anymore because I was happy with my own.

That feeling was hard for me to register into a complete thought at first.  I found it hard to know what it meant. I knew I had become someone different than who I was. I also knew that was life and the natural progression of its flow. But I was shocked by the loss of value of the memory I once believed I would model my whole “being” over. I guess I thought it would always hold a special part of me in some way, but it didn’t.  I know that seems like a small thing, and with all things considered, it probably is. However, it didn’t change the fact that at the time I felt I had lost something that had been a part of me for so long. Somewhere in the mix of it all I decided to care less about something I used to believe defined me in some way.

After that I was able to see where this process happens throughout life in many different ways as we forever morph into the next stage of being; making loss a needed method that’s engrained into our existence more than we choose to realize. But without it, we would never grow and become something new, only grow some more. This process only makes the items, people and feelings we actually could never outgrow even more precious.

The fact that there will be items and memories that will eventually no longer hold a place in my life matters less than it once did. Even though in their own way, good or bad, they led to the life I have now. So, I guess I’m metaphorically looking back into my neatly stored “childish things”. For all the good and bad things, people-related and not, that are found in the horde of memories that has happened in my life thus far… I’m thankful for all of them. Even the ones I think I’ve forgotten, because without them I wouldn’t have realized the person I was always meant to be.

Here’s to the making of more precious memories, limited or everlasting!

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