It seems a part of getting together with old friends that inevitably the conversation stays to “remember when?” and the “good-ole days.”
I got to thinking about this the other day, and decided those good-ole days weren’t as grand as we first think. It is human nature to forget or downplay the bad parts in our lives. We don’t remember all the shit, because to do so would make us feel bad. It is a self-defense mechanism to just live with the good memories of our lives. If you really think about the “good times of your life, you’ll find underlying memories of things which weren’t so great, It is also human nature to worry oneself about unnecessary things unduly even when enjoying oneself.
Do you recall all the things that terrified you as a child? Even the fond memories of things like birthdays and Christmas overplayed by the worries of getting what you wanted.
I recall my father telling me that college would be the best time in my life, and it was to a point. There was a lot of carefree partying, and a life without parental restrictions, but those restrictions were never far from my mind. I still forced myself to study as if my parents were looking over my shoulder. Then there were the long hours of football which took up part of six days a week, and forced us take all our classes during the early morning so our afternoons would be free. Football was a forty-hour-a-week-job from which I didn’t get off till early evening to start my studies. There was a lot of stress involved with playing sports, and that doesn’t include the problems of dating, relationships, and roommates.
Most of these good ole days seem to surround the times when we had fewer responsibilities. One such time for me was just after my wife and I got married. We were living in a dirt-cheap apartment where we always kept our door locked with an eye on our new cars. We both had jobs, but I was going to grad school at night. It would be a few years before my son came along. It seems like a carefree time when we did as we wished, but we kept ourselves on a tight budget while we dreamed of our first house. So even times which seemed so carefree weren’t without their underlying stress. There were still some great memories like our first Christmas, purchasing our first furniture, and finally moving out of that shitty apartment into one only marginally better. The joys of home ownership were shaded with all the new tasks of learning to care for everything. We didn’t help ourselves when we purchased two malamute cousins, Cala and Sergeant Preston just three weeks apart. House training two high-energy puppies like malamutes at once is not a wise proposition I still look back at that as one of our good-ole times just because they were so loving and cute. It was only a year later that we had our first child, and a new set of good-ole day’s memories and problems began. All the ear infections and growing pains were eventually overshadowed by the memories of first steeps, first time using the grown-up toilet, graduations, and hopefully a happy marriage.
I would imagine that by now one can see the reoccurring theme here. During all the good times, there’s the corresponding bad times which we tend to put behind us to maintain our sanity. What I also see is that there will always be bad times. The important thing is to find the silver-lining to everything as another means of maintaining our sanity.