“We weren’t as happy as they were in earlier decades, but we were happy.  We made love and fell asleep to this song in the 90’s and woke up today; what a time machine music can be,” unknown.  I have a little bit of a nostalgia post.  In reconciling the need to live my life all the way up, without restraint, and honoring the work my entire lineage did before me, I have a moment to discuss.  I see all the work they did and how they had the same feelings I have about wanting to do something else and be something more and I see how they consistently held themselves back.  I was listening to some music from my younger days and now people my age are coming back to it and making comments like the ones listed above.  And I suddenly feel even more connected to my parents and what happens as we get older.  Suddenly we feel our youth slipping away like our trajectory is taken out of our own hands and we are thrust on this path from someone else.  There is so much potential in youth and we spend so much time trying to stifle that in kids—I do the same thing to my son.  I want him to be respectful and listen and do what he’s told.  And, with the exception of the respect thing, why is that so important? 

I always did exactly what I was told and when I had to lie or manipulate to get what I really wanted I felt guilty.  Perhaps more accurately, I felt guilt at doing and being what I wanted to be and feeling it necessary to lie or manipulate to get what I wanted.  Why do we do that to our kids?  I don’t want my son to feel guilty for being himself because I felt guilt all the time.  I had this power, I FELT this power in me and I used to challenge adults as kids, but I couldn’t find my footing with those people my own age so I felt weak.  I felt like I couldn’t get anywhere with what I wanted to do.  WE always think the past was easier and better and I think I finally get it: there was ENDLESS potential in the past.  We hadn’t decided who we were, we FELT who we were and we did that without fear until we were told not to.  There is always a moment when we decide to give up who we are for who we are told to be.  And we live in conflict with that because we know we feel something else but our actions don’t support that.  Our entire history of humanity has been nothing but a giant experiment to figure out what works best as individuals and as a whole and we have found some really good points in time and we have some really dark moments.  It isn’t that we were happier, it’s that we had more options.  And options I guess do make us happier.

I often feel like I woke up and was this age without my knowledge or consent.  I have no idea how I got to this point where I have this house with an 8 year old and a 23 year old relationship.  I picked a course and couldn’t quite figure out how to get to where I wanted to be so I settled into a routine I felt I had control over, taking the safe steps toward what I thought I wanted, trying to control how it would happen.  The more I controlled the less options I had.  And then those decisions became my life.  Truly I’m not complaining about any of it because I am so blessed and fortunate.  It’s just scary how we can live a life without really living it.  I’m working to heal that and bring back the options I had when I was younger.  The truth is they are still there and no, it won’t look exactly how I thought it would.  I don’t have the kids I thought I would, I don’t have the money secured exactly as I thought I would, we no longer have the family business and we have lost people along the way.  But there are still glimmers.  I’ve held so tightly to a vision for so long that I wasted time I could have just done something else and gotten the result sooner but I was so attached to what I saw that I couldn’t let it go.  And now it’s happening to a degree and it feels good, but it also feels like I could have had it a long time ago if people had just played ball.  Like if this is where we were going to end up like I called it, why didn’t we just do it sooner? And overall we are happy. I’m happy.  There are a lot of amazing things happening and even greater things are coming with attention and focus.  So we don’t have to go back to how it used to be—we can create that level of safety and desire to be here and now.  That is how we heal: be here now.  We appreciate the past but we live where we are.