This may surprise some of you, but I'm a very sentimental person. I have a couple of "time capsules"...things I'd like to save for the future from important eras/happenings in my life. Some of the items in these capsules are meant for the children I hope to have one day. They are journals, letters, and other artifacts from my pre-teen/teen years on up until now. I've seen countless sitcoms and movies where a curious child or two will run across their mother's old journal. When they read it, they really start to see their mother as a person...as someone who was once just like them. They begin to understand that mom wasn't always mom. I like this idea. I wish my own mother had kept a journal, so I could have read it...maybe gleaned some hard-learned wisdom from it. When I was very young and just learning to read, I occasionally read my older sister's journal. She's 13 years my senior, so it was pretty juicy. Always about boys and feelings from what I can remember. Now, I wish I could have read her journal again...when I was a teenager. She and I don't have the best relationship, so I can't really go and ask her questions about her youth now.
Last night I was rummaging through a drawer looking for penny wrappers. Yes, I might be the only person under 80 who still wraps their pennies. It's a habit I picked up from childhood...for some reason I used to love saving my pennies and seeing how many wrapped rolls I could build up. Anywho, I stumbled across an unintentional time capsule. I have this brightly colored tin filled with small whatnots and whosits. Old things that kind of don't hold much sentimental value, but for some reason I won't throw them away. Things like the tiny, fake, white flowers I put in my hair for jr prom; the small, pink butterfly clippies I got on an orchestra trip to Galveston; buttons, dice (I don't know why I have dice), and other random treasures. I began reminiscing, and dug through some of the papers/pictures that were stuffed in this medium sized tin. I remembered how I felt during prom, on the orchestra trip and in the pictures. Do you remember how, as a teenager, you felt everything was a life or death issue? Wearing the wrong clothes to school would literally mean the end of the world. Having the box "yes", "no" or "maybe"; checked was the difference between floating on cloud nine and plummeting into the pits of hell.
As one grows up, you start to zoom out a bit. The bigger picture comes into focus just a bit more. Sort of like with mapquest where you can view the map at either a street-by-street level, or zoom all the way out until you're looking at a map of the entire state...sometimes the entire nation. Even now, I find myself zooming back in...focusing on things that really don't matter right now. I spent a good amount of time chastising myself for picking up my old "this is the end of the world" mentality, last night. I guess the point of this post is to invoke some sort of thoughtfulness...are you zooming in or out?
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