Time Traveling

I’ve always been a sucker for nostalgia. I think a lot of people are. My entire life I’ve been in a constant cycle of living life and thinking back to specific memories and dates in time over and over again to recognize where I’ve been and where I want to go. Sometimes this is helpful for me to better myself, sometimes it’s a little depressing when I remember things I could have done better or regrets that I still had but maybe buried deep. Overall it’s been something I’ve done for a long time but I feel like I’ve slowed down recently. Part of it is probably what I had mentioned previously about life being different now and not as many obvious chapter points to divide things up and make them easier to remember. In the last month however, I’ve done it a lot. Probably because I’m at another point in time where I can easily digest major time milestones. You know, the easy ones to remember, 5 years, 10 years etc.

The older I get the more of these I end up with since you don’t really think of too many memories when you’re too young to think about them I guess, but as you get older you end up with a decade of something that you’re self-aware of and can reflect back on. When I turned 20 I thought about most of my life prior to that. Same thing when I turned 30 I thought about my 20s.  A lot of people looked back in 2020 to 2010 or even back as far as 2000. 

For me 10 years ago in 2011 is another one of those shifting points in my life. The years surrounding it kind of mash in there as well.  So here in 2021 I have a lot of prominent memories of 2011 since so much changed and happened.  While I’ll have been married for 7 years this fall, it’ll be 10 years of dating next week. That’s crazy to me. Before this, my longest relationship didn’t even make it to 2 full years. So I feel like every step I take at this point in new territory. Same with work, I’ve never worked a job for as long as I have now either.

It’s just interesting to me that I’ve done a lot of time traveling this past month thinking about the past and have remembered a lot of things I’ve long since forgotten about. I’ve made realizations about things and pivotal moments all those years ago that I wasn’t aware of at the time that are plain as day today. It’s ironic that around the same time I started re-reading the Time Traveler’s Wife again. I hadn’t read it since 2009 probably, maybe once since then. But it wasn’t a conscious decision to go back to it, just kind of popped in there while I was thinking about the past.

Now I’m looking at this constant cycle of events and I’m noticing patterns as I get older. Cycles I seem to get into in various forms here and there and it fascinates me. It’s a full spectrum of emotions from good to bad. Achievements and failures. I think I’m in the middle of another one of those right now, but I can’t tell which end of the spectrum I’m on. I’ve made good decisions and I’ve made big mistakes. I guess time will tell where I’m at in the circle. So maybe I’ll be looking back to today 10 years from now and it’ll be a little bit clearer to me.