On Evolving

I turned another year older the other day and it was weird. Very anti-climactic. It was very much like another day on earth except I got gifts and a few more phone calls than usual. Hubs has been trying to make it extra special because this has been a rough year for me and I appreciated his efforts but I must say the joking words my father wrote in my birthday card really rang true. 23 is in fact really a nothing birthday.

My birthday always makes me reflective however. I reflect on who I was and who I almost am. Birthdays have a funny way of doing that to people.

Recently a friend I’ve had since I was in the 10th grade lamented the fact that she wished things were the way they use to be. She wished we could get into our very own Delorian and whisk ourselves back to a time of Cherry Pepsi and copying each others homework. She wanted life to be simple again (it’s always interesting to look back to a period where you thought your life was complicated and realize it really wasn’t.) She longed for lunch breaks in the caf, decorating our lockers and being a small group of people who cared about each other fiercely. We are still a small group of people who are about each other deeply but the other stuff has faded away. We’re all on different roads doing different things and these are roads that we knew that we were travel on but never in a million years would admit to it. I’m married with a steady job and a University degree. She’s had a few failed relationships, a few failed living on her own attemtps, has a steady job and a college diploma. Our other friend is finishing a fine arts degree, living at home and is desperately in love with a boy for the first time. We all came together this past summer at my wedding. They watched me get married and I cried when I saw them. We were together again, happy, joyous and still fiercely caring for one another.

I told this friend that things inevitably will never be like they were. That’s impossible. But the neat thing is that we’ve evolved as human beings. We’ve become rich multilayered characters in this play of life. We’ve become the adults we’ve always feared we would be. We’ve become what we never thought possible. We’ve grown up but not out of each other and we like that…alot.

We’ve evolved and will continute evolving and it’s a beautiful thing.

L.