We try, constantly, to hold on to the things that permeate our minds as being better than the place that we currently are. I am sometimes haunted by nostalgia, the ghost in the corner of the room that we try fruitlessly to compare the current world around us to. It always seems to fall short, never sparking the warm ooey-gooey feelings of rightness that are just out of our reach from our pasts. The child inside is sending us silent home movies of times-gone-by that we can’t ever get back. The thing is: we don’t have to, they’re already there.
When you look in the mirror in the morning, some days you don’t recognize the person staring back at you. The lines on your face thicken and the caverns that live upon it grow deeper. You have changed inside as well, certainly. The truth, though, is that in those eyes starting back at you, even if they are from behind corrective lenses or contacts is the child that you still are. Even if you’ve grown old and it hurts worse to awaken in the morning, the being fueled by wonder that turned you into who you are today is still there, and it always will be.
You remember it all-even when you aren’t thinking about it, it’s all there. Every lesson in tying a shoelace or the way a leaf pile smells from the inside after you’ve jumped into it. Every skinned knee stained pink with mercurochrome, and the sting that you had to endure in the hopes of faster healing is still there, even when it didn’t scar. Every tear shed when a beloved pet or distant (and unfortunately sometimes close) family member is placed in the ground as we tried to comprehend the inevitability of death and how it will come for us all. Though long dried, those tears shed are still compiled into the crooked foundation of who we are and what we are made of.
We are born with nothing, not even a memory. We are a blank slate and an empty canvas. A collection of molecules awaiting the adventure of a lifetime. As the years go by we are a collector of things and memories. They tell our stories piecemeal, accumulating into a substance that is uniquely our own. At the root of it all is the child with eyes wide open, absorbing the world and figuring it out on their own terms with their own flavor. The uniforms we wear may change, but the sweet taste of chocolate milk on a hot summer day, and the sticky faces from a candied apple in the fall are still there propping it all up as a chapter in our ever changing personal novels. One day, when we are gone, the imprint we left uniquely will remain and the world could never be the same again because we lived in it as children.
Nostalgia is just our hearts remembering the things that had to happen to build us into the life that we are. Of course we hold heartfelt memories of those events because they are us. Worlds change, but the events that shaped it are permanent as long as we walk the earth with their memories. One could argue that as we pass them on, they become immortal. It is our sole mission to live a life unique to us. It is inevitable, inescapable, and will happen regardless of our wishes. Every day we breathe, every event we experience, is another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that forms the complete picture of who we are. The magic is in the fact that we hold the rudder to this ship in our hands. While sometimes the current of the water drives the ship of your life in unwanted directions, you still hold the controls. Live your greatest story, and always see it through the eyes of the child within you. The fact of the matter is: you don’t have a choice in the matter anyway. That child and those memories are you.