If you get to live long enough you may one day find that you are not the same person you used to be. Like small corrections over thousands of miles, the deviation doesn’t get any attention until you realize you have missed your point of direction by a long shot.
This can be your personality as well. One day you run into someone you haven’t seen in 30 years and the memories come flooding back. The good and the bad, and you are almost not sure if all those memories are really yours or just old lies you’ve heard.
Then you connect and spend a couple days catching up. The familiar laugh that brings you back, the jabs, the same old responses. Maybe not all of that personality from 30 years ago is gone. Maybe it’s just buried deep under the soil and clay of stress and busyness we call our “lives”.
There is something there and it is refreshing to know that not all the past had to die. Like little trinkets we keep on the shelf, like an old book we carry from home to home, that old life is still a part of us. It’s a good feeling, it’s comforting, it’s reassuring. We did not burn the whole ship of the past, we really did keep what was good.
It is has been very good to reconnect with my old friend after 30 years. The things that changed never mattered. The things that stayed the same are what counts. Almost like I saw him yesterday.
~Brent Daniel – waterman, adventurer, vagabond. Photographed on a recent visit.
