Tuesday, July 27, 2004

A short essay on transience and leaving the past alone

I went to Walmart with my sister today so she could pick up some fabric for a sewing project. While there, I got notebooks for next semester, on sale no less. I love the back to school sales. Nice fresh blank notebooks and folders and new pencils and pens... ah... lovely. A new notebook reminds me that there's always a way to make a fresh start. Even if your entire old notebook is full of worthless crap, you can always pull out a new one and start over. I'm a big fan of starting over. I love erasers, the Delete and Backspace keys, the Undo command, the Edit Post function on Blogger, do-overs, mulligans, and rewinding. If there's a way to go back and make something better, I'm all for it. Let's hear it for impermanence!

Too bad none of those things work for regular life. There's a lot of places where I'd like to go back and fix things. But I wonder if that would be such a good idea. Sometimes I think that if I could go back, I would decide not to go to New Mexico at all and instead just start college up in Bemidji. But then again... if I wouldn't have gone to New Mexico I never would have met my friends down there and I might not have become so self-sufficient. Living nearly 1500 miles from my family for a year really forced me to grow up and learn to do things for myself. That was one of the most emotionally difficult years of my life, but I don't know if I'd want to change it or not. Was it a waste of my time because it put me so far behind in credits, or was it worth it because of the life experience? I really, honestly don't know.

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