Memory

I haven't been writing.
I've been reading, absorbing, taking things in, sometimes observing, partaking, but mostly just being, accepting, and, for lack of a better word, living. Living, as I described in my last post, my average life. I reflect alot. I regret alot too. But I am very much forward-moving. Not in the way that I can never stay still and be comfortable, but more in the way that I can't keep a strangle-hold on the past too long, that my way of making it through life seems to be dependent on me having alot to think about, juggling, but always paying close attention.
My thirties, thus far, have allowed me to continue to develop without the constant strife that seemed to shadow my twenties. Mental acuity. Inner strength. A shrewd but gentle view of the world. A feeling of luck to have a boring life. Boring can be just that, but when nothing catastrophic is happening from day-to-day, boring can bring such relief, such comfort.

I didn't always have, during my young adulthood, a full, layered life, with people who could give so much to me, to whom I could bestow much back onto. In my twenties, as I've laboured on describing in the past few posts, I didn't really know what it would take to make me happy. I didn't know that one day, I would actually be happy. Not dancing-in-the-street-happy, but 'me-happy'. Which means fragments of inner peace. Of acceptance. Accepting myself, with all my leftover neuroses and heartaches, and the bumps along the road that somehow find me, at 36, extremely blessed and grateful for every single blemish in the pavement I have tread upon.

This post is titled memory, so I guess I should give a nod to that.

I've been remembering, and forgiving, my younger self. For her very neuroses that brought me to today. For her very passionately made mistakes. I, for better or for worse, own those mistakes, those decisions, no matter how agonizing they were at the time, no matter how bitterly I can reflect on them now, they are mine, mine only.
I've visited the past in a number of ways in this new year, 2010, both psychologically and physically. I had dinner recently with an old friend, whom I hadn't seen or spoken to in a long time. We had alot to talk about. I had alot to be sorry for. So, in some respects, did she, but this was not a dinner about 're-living' the past--it was about honouring it, and allowing it some breathing room. Sometimes you don't get the opportunity to say you're sorry. I guess now, where I am, I have been given the lesson of saying it whenever I can.
I have another old friend, whom is always on my mind despite our geographical distance, as we seem to have been so much in synch over the past year or so. We have long, intellectual discussions on the phone, and never once do I ever leave a conversation with her that I don't learn something new-not just about her-but about myself. About beliefs, about ways of thinking.

Lots of big thoughts. Life. Death. Denial. Regret.

I continue to read through my old journals as a way of getting to know her (me)---who would ever think you would end up depending on a series of prettily-covered spiral-bound, lined notebooks to get to know yourself, the self of eight, nine, ten, eleven years ago?
I don't live in the past, but there are times, if you are living a good life, it can be a sweet place to visit. Not to dwell on.

To remember.