Passage of time

Outside a hotel in Perth, taken around five years apart. Both times, with a bunch of my RI friends.

Every now and then I think back on my earlier schooling days, and I often find that I miss them. The simplicity of it all, especially. The camaraderie, too. I think it's related - it's easier to make friends back then, when everything is simpler.

Over the years the pattern of this reminiscing has changed. There used to be times when I'd get hung up over how everyone's drifted, or how everything's become more complicated, and just- how everything's changed.

But I think one of the signs that I've really grown is how I've learned to accept that the past is really, well, the past. Lots of it was good, some of it was bad, and I might still miss it all now, but do I want to go back there? The answer is an emphatic no.

Life goes on, it doesn't wait for you, and if you just stop thinking back on how things used to be, you might see that things now aren't quite so bad, that you (hopefully) still have a whole life ahead of you, that there is so much to look forward to, too much to be wasted on living in the past.

It's great that I still keep in touch with quite a few of my friends from the past, albeit not that regularly, and I still hold quite a bit of goodwill for several of the ones I've lost contact with (and hopefully that's mutual), and it'll be swell if our paths ever reconnect again, but if they don't - well, that's life.

It's taken awhile, but I've finally learnt how to walk down the passage of Time.