Relearning Relaxation

My internet was cut off for a few days, but there's as much lack of discipline behind my not having posted in 7 days as there is legitimate excuse. I did take the time to write this post on 10/5, though.

I'm sitting here trying to relax after a 12 hour workday. For the first time in at least 8 months, I have my old Xbox (not 360!) turned on and am trying to find a game in my collection that walks the line between challenging and easy so I don't have to detour into frustration. After destroying the computer in Fight Night '03 and being destroyed in Ninja Gaiden, I've landed on the Sonic the Hedgehog Mega Collection Plus. I suddenly stopped to think about what the 12 year old me, playing Sonic demos at now-defunct big box chains like Lechmere in Massachusetts and New Hampshire in the early 90s, would think to know that at 31 I'm sitting in front of a game system more advanced than anything I could imagine at 12, with 20+ games to choose from, and actually having trouble remaining interested enough to keep playing! I think the 12 year old me would be amazed at the freedoms my life affords me now, and horrified by the freedoms I lost, that we all lose, after childhood. I wibder what the 12 year old me would think to know that I'm now married to a wonderful wife, or that I'm willingly going back to school in my 30s, or that I decided politics wasn't something I wanted to participate actively in after all.

I experienced an odd sense of cognitive dissonance when I was playing Fight Night earlier. The Atmosphere song on the soundtrack came on and for some reason threw me for a loop. I fought back tears and stark depression that threatened to overwhelm me as I remembered years lost to me forever. The feeling was so strong that I was drawn immediately to embrace my wife, as though to remind myself that aging has had its benefits. And regardless of what the 12 year old me would think of the life I live now, I'm pretty happy with it. While I often consider my childhood to be a place from which I can draw inspiration and a pure sense of myself, the fact is that I didn't know anything about the world or my place in it at that age. The same can be said of my 18 year old self, whose opinions of the present me would be different from the 12 year old's but no more valid. Ironically, neither of them is in a place to judge me, but my hope for the future and my growth lies entirely in my ability to judge and improve on them. That's not really irony I suppose; it's just the human condition. And perhaps I'm simply strange for wondering what various past incarnations of myself would think of what I've done with their former vessel, the decisions I've made with the body they once inhabited. I am them, but I am not them; I am more than they were and yet can see from within them. Those past iterations of me form an infinite series, the sum of which is me at this instant, and yet I am also more than the sum of these mes-that-were. What I know now more than I appreciated at any point before in my life is that I will never stop growing and changing mentally, spiritually and physically. That truth gives me hope for the future, and I hope my future selves agree.