It’s amazing what can seem vitally important to us today, and then a week or year later seem absolutely irrelevant.

For some reason the other day I was looking back at some of the really, really old posts, and besides noting how strikingly my writing has changed since then I found it interesting to compare what I was writing about then versus what I think about today.

I don’t tend to share much deeply personal stuff, so posts like this one from August 23, 2005 really stand out:

“…It didn’t help that I saw a someone for the first time in about a year that really made me think about the mythical “what might have been.” What would life be like now if a few things back then had happened a little differently? They’d be different, very different, but I couldn’t help but feel like they would be just as good. It’s not like I haven’t thought about this before, or in the past year, but actually being there, three inches away and having a conversation made it so much more real. Here’s to one more week of being lost in my head, then back to classes and the world of no time to think…”

Clearly someone was on my mind. But five years later, I could not even remotely tell you who that was. No idea.

I spent a few minutes trying to piece things together: I was in grad school in Maryland…working part time at a local mall…still lived close to where I grew up…

Nothing.

Someone who affected me enough to move me to write is now absolutely no part of my life. I guess that’s how it goes.

Not long after that I reconnected with someone who hadn’t really spoken to me in a long time. In those five years since, we slowly became good friends again, much closer really than we had been before. But as life does, things between us changed quickly (seemed interminably long at the time) and we’re right back to having not spoken in months.

Even though we lose some relationships we value so highly at the time, we still move forward with those experiences (and sometimes lessons) that help shape the relationships still to come.

Of course, back in 2005 I was already in the habit of doing not-so-smart things.

Happy Friday.