For the longest time in my life, I didn’t like wading through my past, whether that was through cheap moving boxes full of old photos as a kid or watching home videos with my parents and brother. There just wasn’t that big of an appeal to me for revisiting my childhood. But when it came to looking through photos of my recent past, I was much more interested. And I never actually sat down to ask myself why I disliked my former self but got somewhat obsessed with the latter. That is, I never asked myself those hard questions until here and now, and I think I’m ready to better understand my mind when it comes to reminiscing.
For example, I would actually look at photos of me, and for whatever reason, it would get me into trouble doting on my past. That would end up messing with my thoughts in the present point. But I never really imagined that I would remember my teenage time at this point when I am in 30s. Only here and now do I realize that different choices at that time would have gotten me to a different point. But here I am letting myself know that if I do happen to look up photos of me, it’s okay to reminisce in a healthy way. And that means appreciating who I was then and what lessons I learned. Because being able to recognize and internalize your past self and how you overcame your memories that you don’t consider the good ones can only help arm you for similar issues in your present life. That’s the healthiest way you can see people handling such things, and so you may be able to choose to do the same for your own life. As for finding interest in any of those home videos or old photo albums that are buried within cheap moving boxes somewhere in my parents’ house, good luck on that. For whatever reason I just do not like looking at myself as a child. I feel like I was too much of a different person with different interests and different thoughts. But perhaps I need to look at it from a different perspective: one of psychological interest. If I chose to look at my childhood and analyze my life and how I grew up, I may be able to better understand why some of my interests and hobbies and personality traits evolved as they did.
0 Comments
Since I grew up not traveling much at all (if ever), I think I’ve sort of caught a bug that makes me want to do it all the time here and now. Still, it never happens as often as you’d think. Instead, we tend to take little weekend trips to nearby midwest cities and we end up either staying with friends or in an AirBNB. And these trips are spurred on by hiking schedules. But I know I still want to do more. And so we’ve been taking an entire week to go to a large hiking trip in Oregon every summer that ends up with us camping out all 5 days and learning to climb up the mountains and burning excessive amounts of calories.
I’m already starting to set aside a few cheap moving boxes that have things I don’t want to forget to pack for the days that I want to spend on the mountains. It’s kind of nice to know that these cheap moving boxes will likely travel with me for both legs of the vacation, if only because such boxes can hold things extremely well, they can be closed in if I’m worried about things spilling out or becoming damaged, and they’re great at being organized within the vehicle or even a cabin or campsite. My summer is looking to be an extremely fun one, especially now that one of my planned vacations just became extended. I hope this is a trend for future years ahead of me, because I’ve always felt like I needed to catch up on the traveling I never did for the first 20 years of my life. Now that I have the maturity, the time, the desire, and the income to plan my own trips, I should absolutely take advantage of those resources and put them to good use. After all, there’s not much else out there that will help you grow as much as experiencing other cultures and customs. |