I met up with some close friends from junior high school this past May. It had been 20+ years since we had really sat down to catch up on life. We each took a turn during lunch to summarize our life's journey in about 5 minutes, and then each person extrapolated upon different points in their journey. When I was asked what had been happening in my life for the past 20 years, I felt a bit uncertain about what to share, but somehow words automatically fell out of my mouth. I started with hardships with my parents, never overcoming the loss of my precious grandmother who raised me, attending graduate school for many years, and having my family. My best friend who sat beside me at the lunch table had witnessed most of these events, and she said I had more to share and referred to some recent difficulties I had experienced. It was at this moment when I realized that those incidents to which she was referring had been left out of my self-identification. Then, what scared me, but what I also found to be most fascinating, was realizing how I had identified myself after 20 years, without having given much time to think about it. It seemed like a simple reflex to share the pain of my relationship with my parents, the loss of my grandmother, my endless love for learning, and my love for my family as mile markers in my life's journey, while surprisingly leaving other events out that I thought were significant at the time. It made me wonder how my friends and family might respond to the same question. It made me STOP TO THINK: How would you identify yourself after 20 years if given only 5 minutes?
RSS Feed
