There comes a point in a young person's life where he must accept everything that happened to him. I've reached that point. It's time I understand the experiences I've had and decide what I'm going to take forward with me, at least in the immediate future. Soon, this won't just be in a physical possessions and memory evidence sense.
Those things are rather fleeting, but the things that stay with us, at least stay with me, are the decisions I've made, the things I've done to the people around me and the experiences I chose or fell into in the course of events that compose my life.
It's easy to put something, some memory, some idea in the back of my mind and hope it stays there. Eventually, that pile of crap I stored in the far corner of the attic need to be sifted through. When I open that dusty box, the contents are just shadows of the original. It takes time to digest and understand what it is I'm holding in my hand: "is it a shirt? or a banner? Oh, wait, what did I use this for again?" It's all very familiar but ephemeral, dream-like, intangible.
Recently, I opened one of those boxes dirty and taped up boxes. It didn't make sense to me what I was looking at. Literally, I saw a dark cloud that was threatening to rain inside the box. Slowly, I pulled apart the layers and could see the mangled truth.
It feels good to put that irritant into a box, push it to the back of the pile and face the other side of the room. But eventually, it needs to be opened. There's no other option. The longer we wait, the more we put off rediscovering the contents, the bigger the box gets, the more mold it builds, the more brutal and dangerous the storm becomes. Have that storm knock down bushes, not telephone poles.
