I saw an online forum post recently with a request on options for backing up photos. The person had a recent scare where they thought they had lost their hard drive and all their photos and was looking for something more.
This thought led me to remember the loss of all of my email some time ago. When was that? …wow, three years, almost to the day. You know what? I don’t miss it. I mean, there may be some times that I think about it, but as a whole, I don’t need it. That was a different person.
That made me think, what else don’t I need? And what else could I and others be hanging on to that are really unneeded. Things that could be keeping us in a rut, keeping us from reinventing ourselves, from really progressing. As I’ve said before, these things are an anchor.
Wisdom comes with age, they say. Not sure it’s wisdom, but I sure wish I had some of the thoughts that I do now when I was younger. Then again, maybe I was incapable of those thoughts. Back when you’re young, you’re just struggling to get ahead in the world, and damn if that isn’t so much harder now then it used to be. So any idea of me dropping everything and starting from scratch is a little biased.
I think I’d be better prepared for rebooting my life as a young person because I’d have the energy and drive and not a lot of baggage that comes with being an established adult. But I would be missing all the knowledge of how to get ahead that I’ve gained in my years. Things like business knowledge, common sense, handyman skills, social skills. All these I wouldn’t have available back then. Yeah, things seem easy now, but I’ve been doing it for a long time. The only thing I lack is youth.
But how appealing that sounds. Just to have a schedule of every three years, you sell everything, move somewhere new, ditch all your friends and start over. You could take on a totally different personality, have totally different interests, and through making new friends, experience things that would be completely incompatible with your previous life. In a sense, it would be like experiencing reincarnation within one lifetime, with the benefit of keeping the memories of your past lives.
Oddly, that has been a very strange recurring thought for me – what will my next life be like? I think about the missteps I’ve made in my current life and what I have learned in this life that I hope I recognize early enough in my next life to really make a larger impact on the world. A bigger impact than I can do here and now.
Could I completely start over right now? Doubtful. Although it’s a very appealing thought, I feel that I am laying groundwork for something bigger in the future. Learning patience and tolerance. Developing empathy and recognizing evil… not evil exactly, but getting a good read on people and their motivations. Seeing how selfish motivations are fleeting while sacrifice and sharing give much greater results. Nowhere is this moral exercise more on display than in modern politics.
So, this life is simply a study session. I feel like I’m in my Junior year, and just like traditional school, the Senior year is going to fly right by and then you get to graduate.
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