Saturday, November 26, 2011

The Baby and the Bathwater

A friend of mine once told me that I never change. My grandfather, God rest his soul, theorized that people don't change - they just become more who they are. I'm not sure what's going on astrologically (despite being a Tarot reader and a rather adept psychic, I prefer to be completely surprised - I only look for hints when I feel it is necessary), but since about last August, I've been caught up in some sort of strange turnabout where I keep looking at my life backward instead of forward.

I'm a soldier through it kind of girl. Forward, always forward. I regret little because I realize at every point of the path, I was who I was and made my choices based on where I was and what I valued at the time. I don't often wistfully look back with starry-eyed "what if." I simply take what I learned from success or failure and apply it to future situations.

This new perspective of looking backward to see what I may have left behind is therefore both bizarre and disturbing to me. I'm not sure if this is happening because I am two years overdue for my two-and-a-half-year escape and reinvention cycle that has occupied the last decade of my life or what exactly is going on, but whatever it is feels large and important and is progressing at an annoying crawl. I do know I've had the itch to leave Minnesota for the last two years, and that this time for reasons unknown I've been compelled to stay.

And now this strange, sucking vortex of the past has hold of me. In my forward march, I keep telling myself that what is left behind is not important. Obviously, if it isn't part of my life anymore, it isn't meant to fit in my life, and the Universe has dropped it that I might make room for something else. Usually, if I'm having a fit of nostalgia, one half hour at the piano where I remind myself just how unskilled I really was is enough to cure me of backward thinking. This time, it won't let go.

I keep running into situations where I need to question what I value. Where I not only need to remember the bad structures I'd built in my life that required demolition every time I left "home," but the good structures I'd also had in place that went down with the rest of the building. It seems some things I'm meant to relive and revive - the good and the bad. To what purpose, I do not yet know.

I do know my inner soldier is tapping her foot, checking her watch, and wondering when the next flight leaves.

1 comment:

  1. Your friend isn't looking very hard. We all change, even becoming 'more so' is change. And certainly you will have a number of times in your life where review is important, then you can consciously chose to keep some things, discard some things. Best Wishes, Sharyn

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