I’ll never be that me again

Do you feel that you have been consistent throughout your life?

I would be willing to bet that if you were to go back in time and visit yourself at various points on your timeline, you might discover how disparate your memory is from the reality. This is not to say that we do not have accurate memories of our past, but rather, they are colored by time, reflection and other variables.

If you were to find the opportunity to go back and revisit yourself in these windows of time, you would meet different iterations of yourself that bear close resemblance to what you might remember, and yet they are all different.

We are all a work in progress, and even if we believe there is a strong consistency, there are continuous modifications to ourselves that transpire as a result of our respective life experiences. These color our character, as well as our choices and preferences in life. 

Cumulatively we are continuously in a state of evolution. There could be moments in our past where something substantially transformative, unexpectedly took place. If we were to visit ourselves a few days before such a transformation transpired, might we meet a slightly different person?

There are parts of us that are wiser, parts of us that are scarred, parts of us that are different in our tastes, as well as our preferences, towards any one of the myriad variables in life. We might have been much more idealistic at an earlier age and have evolved into something significantly more pragmatic.

We might reflect back on aspects of our personality that we treasured, which may have been colored by events in our life. Or we might see some uninformed choices that we made at an age in which we were more likely to make emotionally-based decisions and recognize that our current personality would handle things differently. Each aspect of our lives continues to help us evolve into whom we are becoming. Each component of our being grows through continuous evolution, giving us disparate iterations of ourself.

We might look back with fondness or with regret, but whichever emotion that is stimulated, we can clearly see how much we have evolved over the course of our lifetime. With our deepest and most heartfelt memories triggering with this particular concept, we ultimately learn unique things about ourselves, that we might not normally contemplate, were we not making a myopic comparison between whom we are, and whom we used to be.

Happy Thursday!