One Small Act: Remember These Are the Good Old Days
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth…
This week marked an interesting confluence of reunions. My husband and I had two sets of visitors come into town, friends we haven’t seen in 15 and 20 years, friends who were with us in our twenties, before marriage, kids, houses, careers...Seeing them felt like no time had passed. And yet, it also reminded me of how much life we’ve all lived, and how much has actually changed.
To pour the nostalgia on a little thicker, we also coincidentally had tickets to the 25th reunion tour of Pete Yorn’s Music for the Morning After, one of our favorite albums from those days. The week ended with a beautiful high school graduation ceremony for a family friend, standing at that edge we all once stood on with so much possibility ahead, and so many ordinary days and extraordinary years to come.
It all felt full circle. Like my whole life from the past 25 years flashed before my eyes in a single week. It made me think of Baz Luhrmann’s “Sunscreen”, a spoken word song that came out right around the time I graduated high school. If you don’t know it, the whole premise is a commencement address built on one piece of advice: wear sunscreen. The line that always gets me is: enjoy the power and beauty of your youth — you won’t understand it until it’s faded. Time passes, and then, years later, you’ll look back at photos and finally see how much possibility lay before you, how fabulous you really looked, and how life was actually so special and magical all of that time. That’s exactly how this week felt.
One Small Act: Remember These ARE the Good Old Days
My sister-in-law has an entryway in her house worth noting. It’s not fancy. It doesn’t have interesting architecture or a clever design. It’s simply a hallway. What makes it memorable is a giant sign that reads “These are the Good Old Days” surrounded by dozens of photos of friends and family, printed out and pasted right to the wall. It stops me every time I walk in.
It’s a sweet slap in the face to remember to appreciate these ordinary days. Because the good old days aren’t behind us, they’re happening right now, on this idle Sunday, in the middle of our regular extraordinary lives.
Here is a photo of me and my beautiful friend who came to visit this week, taken approximately 25 years ago. We were of course totally oblivious to the power and beauty of our youth… ;)
Thank you for reading. Wishing you a peaceful, creative, and kaizen week ahead. If you enjoyed this post please subscribe to keep me motivated to keep writing and creating! P.S. here is a link to the listen to the Sunscreen song, it’s worth the time!
xx, autumn