nostalgia.

When I look through my old journals, I wonder, "Where has time gone?" It's bittersweat to realize that I'm not a child anymore. Where did those years go? It seems like so long ago. I feel like I've nearly forgotten that little girl. As I look at my old entries, I smile at my handwriting - sprawled across the page in cramped, untidy letters. I laugh at my stories that once seemed so dramatic and time-consuming. I chortle at my maturity that wasn't so present back then (and is still quite void today). And I weep when I realize that that is time I will never have back. That is a little girl who has grown up and gone away for the rest of my life. Perhaps I can pull her out every once in awhile when I'm with children and I can get away with childish things? It almost seems a pity that you only have one life, and such a short life at that. By the time we become mature enough to realize what life is all about and what we should do with it, we're already too close to the finish line.

Perhaps that is not correct, though. Many people know what they want in life, and what they want to do. But there are also many who don't. I just think it's sad that 2008 is long gone, and oppertunities that I had then, have passed me by. Oh, what fantasies used to run through my little head - they're gone now, too. That's what makes me sad. Things that once were, are now no more. They're lost.

"Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: You find the present tense and the past perfect."

Somehow it is so true that both the past and future seem like better places to be than the present. Why? Because we're not dealing with them at the moment. We're not living in the past, nor occupying the future; we live in the present, and that can often be hard to accept when the present isn't what we want it to be. Hence we remember only the good things in the past, and wish to high Heavens to be there...or we dream of hyperbolized conceptions of the future and desire destiny now. Maybe I should be switching out those "we's" with "I's". Well anywho.

It's encouraging to think, however, that this isn't the end. This isn't my real life. My real life hasn't even begun yet, and there is no reason or rhyme to regret, or feel remorse about what has been, or be anxious about what will be. Even though the past sometimes seems like a better place, when I think truly about how I felt then, I remember not being able to wait for where I am right now. And then I see how far I've come, and who I am, and I wouldn't change or alter who God has made me at this exact point in life. And I will wait patiently until he molds me into who I will be in the future. Besides, in the end, these trivial anxieties won't really matter.

...........

Pippin: "I didn't think it would end this way."

Gandalf: "End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.

Pippin: "What? Gandalf? See what?

Gandalf: "White shores. And beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.

Pippin: "Well, that isn't so bad."

Gandalf: "No. No, it isn't."

.......

The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King