visiting memories

Last week I looked through old pictures from the past few years, on a mission to clear up space on my hard drive. Instead I dug up memories. Memories of people and places that I love, now an ocean away from me. With each picture a story came to mind. Memories of yard sales, adventures in the woods, crazy invented games in the basement, lemonade stands on the golf course, school plays, volleyball games, babysitting, badminton in the back yard, parties. Normal things. Every day things. But things that resonate deeply in my heart.

Looking at those things a world away from me, I could have been jealous and lonely and sad, as I too often am. Jealous for the things I am not doing, lonely for my friends, sad that I am missing so much of their lives. Instead? I could only be one thing. Thankful.

Thankful for those people. Those relationships. Those friendships. Thankful for the places—material things, but still things that hold a place in my heart. The days that feel like yesterday, and the days that feel like ten years ago. Thankful with every fiber of my being. My heart melted, and I said thank you. 

Visiting memories is a funny thing. Seeing how much people have grown (In two years? A lot.) on the outside and wishing you could be there to see them grow on the inside too. Memories are sweet, sad, and sometimes, in fact most often, they wander somewhere between both shores, on the sea of bittersweet.

Something else that’s funny though, I don’t ever want to go back. I’m not saying that I don’t want to go back to those people and to those places, there are some times where I want nothing better than to board a plane and fly across the Atlantic. What I don’t want to go back to is the me before Europe happened. Because really, who wants to go back to their 13 year old self? I like the person I am now more than any other me, and I couldn’t bear to not know the people I know now or have not done the things I’ve done. What’s more, I know that in another two years, I won’t want to go back to the 15 year old me either. I won’t want to have missed meeting the people I will have met and doing the things I will have done.

The present has me enthralled, and the future has my full attention as it sits perpetually around the corner. The past? Well, I love visiting it and remembering the things we did together, the places we went and the people we saw, but I’m always quite happy to come home again, and face the things to come once more.

There's an idea that has really struck me the past few days: that all life is memory except for the single present moment that you're living. It’s something so obvious, yet so fundamental. We all know it, but do we all stop and think about it? How profound it is? How each and every single moment that we live will someday be a memory?

We're making memories right now people. All those little decisions, all those little seemingly insignificant things: in the next moment, they will be memories. Maybe not memories that we remember, although I think that it’s all in there, somewhere. Someplace in the dusty recesses of our mind, and someday something will call them out into the light, to be reexamined and laughed or cried over.

Just like those memories from the States were.

Those memories that I am beyond thankful for.