“I never had friends like the ones I had when I was 12.  Jesus, does anyone?”  Jerry O’Connell.  I LOVE this.  Yes, it’s tinged with the very nostalgia we talked about getting caught up in (and avoiding) the other day, but I think this is also resonant of the very feelings I spoke of in that piece.  We are all looking for a certain feeling from a certain time.  There was a safety in those moments we are trying to recreate whether it was with friends or with family.  But these are the people we carry with us because they were with us in our formative years.  They ARE our formative years.  they show us the way to make it through learning how to become the next version of ourselves. They saw us in our discovery and we helped find each other as well.  That is not an insignificant thing.  And nostalgia aside, those formative years are so important to our being that any symbol of safety from that time, any symbol of familiarity where someone sees us for who we are is something we can latch onto.  We feel less alone when we have someone to go through it with us.

I was never trying to say that nostalgia was all bad, I was merely trying to help people understand that it isn’t a place we can live and that we aren’t necessarily trying to relive anything, we are trying to recapture a feeling.  There are other ways to recapture that feeling than going back to how things used to be. The truth is anything can be nostalgic.  There is another truth: that we can find the safety and connection we are looking for in any moment.  We just have to be willing to be as vulnerable as we were as children.  We have to understand that we still don’t know everything even if we know more now and that this life is always a learning curve.  We deal with the cards we get and we can choose to find security in our own abilities.  Our safety is within.

When I think of the friends I had when I was 12, there are two, maybe three who are still around and I do consider myself fortunate for that.  As I’ve gone through each progression of who I am, I find that there are pieces of myself that I want to bring back.  There are pieces of myself I started exploring long ago that I feel still need to be developed and explored further.  But I don’t necessarily want to go back to who I was at that time.  There was a piece of me who wanted to perfect and redo everything I did “wrong” back then but now I know that was just a sick part of my mind who couldn’t cope with not being perfect.  But putting that shield aside, I know that all is how it was meant to be and I am grateful to be where I am now.

The truth is we can look at this moment and be grateful we have come as far as we have. It’s important to acknowledge who we were and thank that version for teaching us what we know now.  We aren’t meant to carry the burden of who we were, we are meant to move forward into who we are meant to be.  Don’t get stuck, but yes, there are things to be grateful for, there are moments we need to appreciate from the past.  There are lessons we learned that we will carry with us forever and those things will always fare us well because some of the greatest lessons we can learn we learn as children.  Allow ourselves to continue to grow and develop and always strive to keep that openness.  The world is a magical place and we create most of it in our minds.  Love it, but don’t get stuck there.  Growth is key.