Every day that passes, I get a little bit older. I get a little older and laugh a little at the person I used to be. The laughs start hesitant and self-conscious at recent scars and failures, yet lose all inhibition as I wander backward into the things I can no longer judge myself for, for beyond that blurry line is a person that is no longer me.
Importance waxes and wanes, with every passing day. Priorities shift like clouds, sunlight streaming through the gaps to reveal something…obvious? Obvious to me now, obvious to a person who is no longer blissfully ignorant and blinded by innocence.
Is this what they call maturity? These laughs at the past aren’t as clean and pure as I thought they’d be. There’s a bitter aftertaste to them, a resentful twinge, a cringe at each successive oversight, fading in intensity as years recede.
Why then do I feel nostalgia, why does anyone? Why do we implicitly want to make the same mistakes again? Because the nostalgia I feel isn’t to make the past “right” through what I now know – that erases the person I am today, and that’s something I can’t stomach. No, my nostalgia urges me to erase my knowledge of my own folly, to relive each error as I was.
This peculiar masochism of nostalgia has shown me that maturity and wisdom are far, far apart, and if by some miracle I make it to the former I have a long way to go before I reach the latter. If this is what they call maturity, it is no blessing. It is a burden of caveats and checklists and lessons and signs that we must always keep in mind to avoid falling for the same traps and tricks again. And though I can’t speak for everyone, I think that our nostalgia for innocence is our nostalgia for a world not confined by the red tape we’ve imposed on our eyes.
This quasi-maturity I (maybe arrogantly) think I possess has stranded me less-than-halfway up a mountain. At the top is wisdom, and at the bottom is innocence. The choice I must make, and that I think we all must make, is whether to try and make the summit, or to backtrack down the slope. To persist in trying to learn lessons and apply them to our lives, or to simply give up the red tape and live every day as a new book, rather than a new chapter.
If there’s a right answer, I haven’t found it. I can’t give any reader or myself any certainty or reassurance, though I wish I could. The choice is your own and it is my own, and the right to decide the path from halfway up is inviolable.
But there is one thing I can tell you while suspended on that mountainside, looking down at my life of 18 years and looking up towards a peak I can’t quite see.
The view from up here is incredible.
The Galley with No Name 
You manage to put feelings we all feel into such beautifully written words! Ever since I started reading your blog, I’ve been more retrospective and have, in a way, positively romanticised my thoughts and emotions and it’s greatly helped my mental health! Looking forward to reading more 🙂
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Thanks so much for the kind words! Ever since I started this blog, I’d always hoped deep down that my ramblings could actually help affect someone for the better, but I never imagined they really would. The fact that this has helped you has really renewed my faith in this project as not just some idle creative pursuit, but as a positive thing, and I can’t help but hope it continues to provide you some comfort wherever you are in the world!
And thank you for all the comments, it’s really nice to hear your thoughts and opinions on the stuff I’ve written.
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