When I was 8 years old and my problems were arguably nonexistent, I wanted nothing more than to be 12. I was convinced that 12 was the age that my life started and I got cool. I remember on my 10th birthday feeling a sense of accomplishment that I had finally entered double digits, and I was sure that this was when all the real fun began. What they don’t tell you about entering double digits is that things get significantly harder as you progress deeper into them, and it really doesn’t get that much more fun.
The future that I once believed was filled with freedom, glamour, and my own phone is equally as filled with responsibility and choices and planning. Where I once felt excitement and anticipation for my future, I find myself fearful of the unknown. So when did we stop being excited for what’s to come and start being afraid?
It started being scary the minute that our futures stopped just being fun.
When our idealized tomorrows, became our realistic yesterdays and todays. When we stopped seeing futures full of no curfews and choices and started to see stress and deadlines. We learned what it feels like to fail, to lose someone we love, to be disappointed, to grow up. We stopped being excited for the future, when we realized that with our newfound freedom, comes the inevitability of failure.
So we cling to the past because its history is already concrete and it’s comfortable. Our past is soaked in nostalgia of the “better days,” of the simple days, the times we took for granted and were too careless to appreciate.
Nostalgia is beautiful; it is the gentle reminder of our past that reminds us why it’s all worthwhile. Why we study until 4 a.m. for that hopeless exam, why we give ourselves to people over and over again, even though they continue to hurt us, why we wake up every day. It gives us hope on the bad days, that there are better days to come.
It is beautiful and it is dangerous.
It lets us remain frozen in fear that our best days are behind us, tricking us into believing that we can only handle what has already been dealt to us. But to believe that we are only capable of what we have already accomplished is the most ignorant and dangerous thought there is.
Our comfortable and experienced past is exactly what enables us to face our ominous and unpredictable futures. We have been training for our futures our whole lives, the only thing preventing us from facing them, is the notion that we are somehow unable to deal with whatever life throws at us.
It is impossible to know what we face in the future, but we have to the confidence to believe that it is better than standing still, fearful to act, safe in what we know.
What will come will come and when it does, we will face it. We are ready for the future, as soon as we are willing to let go of the idea of that the past is the best we can do.
