September 24, 2010

Post #1: Beginnings and Endings

I like to start off everything with a quote. So here goes:

“Growing up is never easy. You hold on to things that were. You wonder what's to come. But that night, I think we knew it was time to let go of what had been, and look ahead to what would be. Other days. New days. Days to come. The thing is, we didn't have to hate each other for getting older. We just had to forgive ourselves... for growing up.”

-The Wonder Years

I think it's only fitting that this is the quote I finally decided to use for the first post that I've been putting off for weeks. I just didn't know how to begin because I felt like I had so much to explain. But you know what? In life, not all things start at the beginning. In fact, more often than not, the best stories start at the end and backtrack to explain the past.

I used to compare getting to know someone to starting to watch a television series in the third or fourth season. You get hooked, but there's still so much more to know. About the characters, their connections, their pasts. So you either go back and watch all of the previous episodes, or you put the pieces together as the series progresses. This process gets a lot more complicated the further into a series you start watching. Similarly, the older a person is when you meet them, the more baggage (both good and bad) they have to share with you before you ever really know them. Even then, there are just some things you have to have gone through with a person to truly understand them.

So, like I said, some of the best stories start at the end and then jump back to the beginning to explain how and why things turned out the way they did. This always seems to make sense to us, seeing as how hindsight truly is 20/20. Therein lies the catch-22 of life. Looking back, we can make sense of everything. As it's happening, though, we often can't step back far enough to see things clearly. We are often a mystery even to ourselves.

We really only get to see ourselves unfold at the same rate that everyone else around us does, though we may have an inside perspective. However, we can only speculate how we would or would not react to situations and never truly know how we would until we experience those things. We're all making our best efforts to get to know ourselves but are simultaneously creating those same selves. I'd like to think that everyone, in the moment, is always striving to be genuine. But because we can't ever truly know ourselves (and therefore even one another), our every word and every action is simply an allusion to who we truly are and will become. Hence the creation of the term "genuendo."

Every word I type on here is genuendo about who I am, why I'm here, and what that means, if anything. I don't know how to end this. But I'm happy about that. To beginnings!

2 comments:

  1. Yay! Your first post! I saw that it was up a few days ago but just finally got the chance to read it because I was moving.

    ReplyDelete