as opposed to flooding. I was at the supermarket the other night, and ran into someone from college. It turns out he moved down here over a decade ago, and is still in touch with some other mutual college friends/acquaintances. We caught up and reminisced as my frozen goods melted (!!!) and I realized that my memories from college are fragmented and reassembled. It’s better than my childhood memories, which are mostly forgotten, or remembered as episodes of failure and humiliation. Let’s not go there, because I’m in a pretty good mood.
It took me a few minutes to realize that he had been jumbled up a bit with someone else whom I didn’t like, and as we talked, a lot of things settled back into the correct places. I realized that I really had a good time with him when we were working on shows or hanging out, and that it would be fun to re-establish a friendship with him. We exchanged phone numbers and e-mails, and I’ll have to fit in some time to socialize.
A couple of days have passed, and the memories that this meeting triggered have been coming in, a few at a time, and I’ve come to the realization that, while I really liked college and the friends I had there, I like the person I am now so incredibly much better than the person I was then. I still have a ways to go – I may never be fully self-actualized (I was telling the kids about Maslow’s Needs Heirarchy the other day!) but my needy and insecure motivations that caused me to do and say things that pushed people away and kept me from accomplishing so many things have changed so much for the better.
I always have to remember that “what do you want to do?” is a much less important question than “why do you want to do it?” I ask that second question of myself all the time now, and it saves me from so much pointless activity and less-than-ideal decisions. I try to pass that on to the kids without lecturing them. I still lecture them, though. Heh.
The hardest part, though, is to look back and see the negatives and not judge myself or fill with regrets. No matter how I might have been in the past, it put me on the path to who I am today. And no matter what I’m still struggling with, it’s putting me on the path to who I’ll be later on. So it’s all good, and I would love to get together with old friends from younger days, and make even better adult friendships.
