When I was 7, we had a chandelier in our living room; a heavy, shiny, glittery thing. But I was more obsessed with the idea, or rather, the hazard of it falling and crushing my tiny self to pieces than I was with its beauty.
When I’m 30, I plan to have a house with a few glass walls and I am more concerned with being enraptured by their beauty than I am with a few toddlers potentially mindlessly bumping into them.
I tend to think like that – left brain in the past, right brain in the feature, and neither side concerned with the immediacies of what’s right in front of me. After all, if it worked out then it will work out now, right?
As a young person, you hear horror stories about people who weren’t focused on the present, and how ultimately staying stuck in the past ruined them. I have yet to see a real-life example of this. The past is a beautiful thing as is the future. Who would not want to wander the halls of your best days to pass? Who would not want to wander the halls of your best day to come? Who would not like to look in the mirror and see one’s 7-year-old self again, anxious about, of all things, a chandelier? Who would not want to wander into the distance chasing after a toddler, your main concern being their inability to tell the glass from the air, to tell the oxygen from the walls?
There is no way not to be in the present. With every sentence posed to us, every exam question answered, every traffic light observed we show that we are in the present so it is of no or little consequence to from time to time wander off into a time machine.
The past is a beautiful thing, as is the future. And neither of them deserve to be denied out of fear.
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