Reminscing

A friend of mine dropped by the house and I wanted to show him a particular picture I had taken when I was in India in ’99. It’s been a long time since I had opened up that album; a really long time, years in fact! Yet when I began leafing through the pages which was in some loose chronographic order from the start of the trip to the end, I began to relive that time backpacking around Goa and all the good times that I had!

I began to realise too that back then I was really happy. Life was different then to what it is now; it was more carefree, more exciting. I felt a bit sad actually to realise that time had passed and would never be again. That I was different – older and maybe a bit more cynical – because of the reality that I had been living in for the last couple of years.

And still I kept flipping the pages of the album, until I had finished that one. Then I went and got another album.

This one was the time I was in Egypt when I was there with a friend in 2001 for a Tom Middleton festival at the Cairo Opera center. It was amazing experience and each photo brought back more memories. And again a part of me lamented for time that was gone, but also for a part of me that I seemed to have lost.

Thinking about this – this idea that I had lost a part of myself – I came to realise a truth. We all change, but we do not lose our essential self. The person who we really are does not get lost. But instead just changes for circumstances. I could see within myself the same person who looked out from the photographs and knew that that same guy still lived within me, but that I had just put that side of me away so that I could live in this place I live in day to day.

I began to see that we can be whoever we want to be, and really it isn’t that hard. We only have to adjust the way we think about ourselves and the change happens. Changing ourselves is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do. Most of it comes down to desire in the end.

As I closed the second album, this time I had a good feeling in my heart. I was reminded of a happier side that I now know I had merely forgotten, and that to be that person again, I just had to… be him again. The difficulty was really in realising how simple it all is!

Padwanna.

The Reminscing by Mentalechoes, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.