Along the Path I Once Trekked

You leave a place with hopes, and sometimes fears, and then somehow life circles you back through to bring a memory flickering as if you're meant to stop. Take a look around and gather whatever it was you lost sight of before. And in that, you come to learn that the road drops there. You push the brake pedal down slowly and the vehicle comes to a halt as your gaze rakes in what you missed before.

The only constant in life is change, and yet the physical places associated with where we once walked never entirely flee us. We pass through them so often failing to understand how they make up the scenes that are the stories of our lives. One day, we are casually listening to Youtube and a music video comes on, we look up and suddenly places that once brought us such simple joy are playing across the screen, but things aren't like they used to be. Closed signs and now for lease litter the various shops and amusements that you once took for granted, and the places that you traveled in passing daily suddenly aren't the same. They too have moved forward beyond the containment of time and evolved into something else. A duplex that was a former large white house with a wraparound porch that used to loom on the corner beside an elementary school has now become a parking lot of shimmering black asphalt and the memories that once made up your summers are suddenly no more. The idea that at one time large looming oak trees and a grassy hill of a yard over three acres in size once hosted so many beautiful events, laughter, and joy.

But now?

Nothing that ever was there before remains - except in the loving corner of your memory. Indeed, the road had dropped there, and what you had hoped to lay eyes on again and once underestimated is no more.

But you, you still are.

And more than that, the many people who occupied the space in community with you also remember those nights - dancing, smiles, birthday parties, and the beating down of piñatas.

You never really fully grasp what you once had until you no longer have it anymore, but when you get to that point, that's when you have to pause.

Do a little introspection and peer inside to see what it was you accomplished in your life since you fled this space that you once couldn't wait to leave. Did you reach the stars you imagined you would when you sat beneath the skies in that yard?

So distant and far away, that now, as you step outside of your car and walk across the parking lot, you can almost feel and hear the music, and the spirits of the people who joined you in those many years passed.

When the road drops, however, you don't have to focus on all the loss. You can cross the path another way to find who you are and always were, but reflect on how you've tied in to the places you once went and how those tracks now covered by new pavement can never be removed from your heart or the hearts of the people whose memories were created in unison with you.

And you stand tall as you pivot and spin in the empty parking lot, recalling that while buildings and spaces change, the one thing that has remained is you, and yet even so, you, too, have changed and fulfilled a full circle moment, defining your life for all its greatness.