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Wednesday, August 24, 2011

All That Matters

In going back through some archives while Puff was out of town, I found this entry and liked it. This was from back in late 2008...

I was over at Kimhead's earlier tonight and she pulled out a pile of her old diaries that she had brought back from her dad's house. She mentioned that she had made an entry back sophomore year of college about where she saw all her friends 10 years from that point. (Come to think of it... we got them out so she could tell me mine, but we never got around to it!) Anyway, her saying that made me think of when I had done "life predictions" for all of my friends way back when in high school. It was funny too because another friend had just made a comment in recent days asking if I ever went back to read my old entries.
 
I guess the whole point of writing is to go back down the road to read them. Or maybe that's just part of the point. The other point may be to document for the sake of documentation. Or to vent. Or to be creative. Or to try to creatively pose questions to make people think without blatantly coming out and giving someone the answer to their problem. Regardless, looking back at old entries is a fabulous trip down memory lane. As Kimhead was flipping through some diaries, showing me hilarious emails between the two of us, and some seriously embarrassing web posts I had made about me and Mr. Smith and our future children's names (Troy Kenneth, Roland Patrick and Kennedy Jaylin... for those interested) she made a comment that really stuck out. She said that the students she works with freak out sometimes about the smallest things that are just so stupid, yet they care so much. And then she patted the journal that was in her hand, that was bursting at the seams from so many entries, and said "This is just stuff that doesn't matter anymore."
 
I guess that just got me thinking. Are all those pages and pages of entries about old flames and mentions of current events and mindless ramblings about baby names (OK, so only I would have mindless baby name ramblings, but you get my point...) really meaningless?
 
Because quite frankly, I think it holds a lot of meaning. Perhaps the stuff in those pages isn't necessarily relevant but it definitely shaped us as people. And Kimhead made that same comment; the whole shaping us thing. And I am a firm believer in that. To quote my own previous entry; "If it wasn't for living our past, we wouldn't have our present and the hope for our future." And I'm sticking with that theory. If it wasn't for crying ourselves to sleep over relationships that ended or notating our feelings on September 11th or trying to go on a Knowledge Quest... we wouldn't be the people we are today. No matter how piddly and stupid and mundane those things might seem to us NOW, they meant something THEN. And what a wonderful way to relive those moments than to be able to pick up a journal and flip to a random page and immediately be transported back to a certain place in time to a certain memory. And whether good or bad, it's sometimes good to relive those moments. To understand where we were coming from... that younger version of ourselves.
 
On nights like this, instead of watching TV, I'd pull out Volume 27 and read about how life was back then. What boy I was drooling over and what friends I was fighting with and what the Cowboys record was. Ya know, all those really important things. I've been trying the past few years to find a little more insight to my ramblings. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's far more insightful to myself than to any of my other readers. And sometimes it doesn't make any sense at all. I guess since I don't write creatively anymore, my moments of "brilliance" have to come in blog form. I think the fall of 2005 and the spring of 2006 were the best entries I've had. But there was a lot of life turmoil and a lot of searching going on in my life back then. Searching and life turmoil that should have lead to life decisions that I didn't have the guts to make. But again, if I hadn't made the decision I did, I would never have ended up where I am now.
 
And therefore, even if I sit down and read those old entries and think "What was I doing?" I can't fault myself. Because those mistakes and those memories and all those paths I went down and looped around and went down again, those are what brought me here today. To celebrating 3 months of dating Puff. To having an awesome new promotion. To having great friends. To having tons of stuff coming up to go out and experience.
 
And you know what? I'll document those experiences too. And any chaos or turmoil that has happened recently or will happen in the near future... 5 years from now (or heck, even 5 days from now) it might be stuff that we can lump into that "It doesn't even matter" pile. But it always WILL matter... it's just how we handle it that will determine the extent to which it affects our lives.

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