You're the Boss
There comes a moment when you realize that you are in charge of everything. Or maybe you don’t. You spend your youth believing you are invincible and that a thousand years stand in front of you. You know nothing. You don’t understand time. You are a baby. You take all of your experiences and the things you’ve learned from teachers and friends and your parents, then you mold it into yourself sub-consciously. Maybe you plan, maybe you ride the wave carelessly, but either way it becomes apparent that now you are an “adult” and it’s really easy to realize you don’t feel like it. Eighteen is supposed to equal something next-level, but honestly you just got a few days older. You probably don’t have any real experiences, and everyone expects you to go out in the world and get a job at NASA or something.
I guess some people have goals. I guess some people strive towards dreams early in their life. I think most people just wake up each day and do what feels right and then they end up where they end up twenty years later and finally it sets in. Maybe I should’ve listened. But it doesn’t matter because that is gone. You are only smarter now because you lived another twenty years. You had your heart broken and you got fired from a job and you shoplifted and you got someone pregnant and you went to some concerts and you crashed a few cars and you hurt people and you changed someone’s life. Most of the important stuff you can’t even recognize because you are unaware of what you do to other humans.
The ability of the human mind to recall smells and touches and feelings and colors from a specific basement in 1997, but to completely forget what you did yesterday will never fail to amaze me. That little thing that someone did to/for you they probably don’t remember, and the thing you said to that girl in high school might cross her mind every week. What makes us remember certain things no matter how insignificant they might seem? Why do our minds do what they do?
And how many things do you witness today that might as well not even happen? If you can’t remember it, did you do it? Does your brain actively help to try and eliminate pain or re-write history? How does anyone every get any historical event correct? How can we trust our own memories ?😂
And why do some grow and others stay the same. Why are some people obsessed with progress and others content to float in a pool of nostalgia? I’ve edited many memorial videos/slideshows for people over the years and every time they pick the main image - the one that opens everything up - I cannot help but think about whatever was happening to that person that day and how they really had no idea that THIS would be the image that everyone wanted to look at when they pass. Did I take that photo yet? Has the photo that someone will use in my memorial video already been taken? Was that a good day for me? Is there any possible way to grasp that gravity of that image while I was in the moment?
