Thoughts and Memories at 56
Recently I’ve begun to become more nostalgic than usual. Lately I’ve spent a lot of time on Facebook watching and reading the doings of many old friends I have come back in to contact with. Of course the contact is over the cyber reality of the internet and in a way it’s not real contact but, contact none the less. As I have watched and read and interacted, at times many memories and moments that have passed in to the ethers of time have raced through my head and I begin to see, that where I am now and where I was then is so far apart. It begs the question, “Is the me I am now and the me I was then, the same person?”. How do we determine who we are? Do we base it on our actions? On our relationships? On our accomplishments? On our failures. Or perhaps it’s a culmunation of all of these and more.
Many times I have watched people come and go from my life and even though they may be gone, they still dwell in my memories as (perhaps I’m part elephant?) I truly never forget them. I am, as one would say, an older man with different stages of my life here and gone by, I have older children that know a different father than the one I am now to my younger children. Time has a way, for some, to teach us different ways to be and that brings me back to my question. What do we base our changes in life on, time seems to be a huge factor but time is also an illusion we created to measure deteroration of matter and energy.
SO many times I look ahead and see where I want to be and make plans to reach that goal, but I find when I lose sight of them and move with the flow of the universe I become more of what I want to be than when I try to accomplish laid out plans.
I look at my friends so many of them in thier lives living them, and moving through space as gracefully as geese in flight, and all of us joining in this dance of information sharing on facebook. I begin to feel that nostalgia for the ones who aren’t here. Past lovers, deceased friends, people who have disappeared in to lifes fog of time, I begin to wonder where they are and what has, and did happen to them.
Perhaps what I’m feeling is my own misgivings at how I am beginning to change, a few more grey hairs, the pounds that come and go, the hint of double chin and the age appearing in my eye’s as I look in the mirror. The days I have spent in the high desert alone and in the mountains with no one else there but me were less lonely than now with friends and family in reach.
The irony of it all.
