The trickiest thing about being a little kid is the whole pattern recognition thing. You don’t quite grasp the microcosm at the outset, but life is really about mastering repetition- and you embark upon your personal quest the moment you learn to roll yourself over. Progressively, the degree of complexity increases until you ultimately find that you’re back to basics and learning how to best ease yourself in and out of bed at an advanced age behind the soundtrack of a television blaring at an excessively high volume.
That is, of course, if you are lucky.
But I’m not trying to project my life out as some depressing, “My Body’s Failing Me” final stage where all of this learning comes to naught; I’m far too young and inexperienced to presuppose such a conclusion. Instead, I’m working my way through what is most likely the prime of my life- and I’ve been around long enough to see that many if not all of my life’s events loop around in a surprising yet strangely obvious cycle. Where I once imagined that all experiences have a definite beginning and end, I am now seeing that this actually the exception to the rule. My personal epiphany is deceptively self-evident, but it still blows my mind when I stumble back upon the realization. I’d say that this is the one pattern in my life that I never manage to see repeating itself.
Why do we keep returning to the same people, and the same places? Maybe it’s because the world really is that small, and we are more interconnected than we ever would have imagined- whether we like it or not.
So what the Hell am I driving at when I start waxing philosophical on the whole “life is cyclical” maxim?
Well, I’m thinking about the experiences that shape you as a young kid- be it the neighborhood that you grew up in, the friends you first made, the tragedies that introduced you to the darker side of life as well as the emotions that made you learn for better or for worse how to comport yourself as a human being. You are exposed to so many things as a small person that it can often become almost too much to bear- and when you leave your childhood behind it’s easy to think “Whew, thank god that’s over.”
You grow older, you part ways, you learn to style your hair without hairsprayed bangs, and you imagine that your history will forever stay where you left it.
But it won’t.
Not only do certain people cycle back into your sphere of existence, but they do so in a positive way that you didn’t see coming. Often they come back and point out behaviors and patterns in your life that suddenly seem incredibly obvious once identified. They can do this because they share your origins, perspectives and the same bizarre upbringing that no one else in the world can begin to understand. Reunions like this- if you’re lucky- are a big part of life’s recurring patterns.
The toys may have changed, but if you’re cut from the same cloth, chances are you’ll still share the same proclivities and sense of humor.
Side note: I’m not so blindly nostalgic as to think that there are just as many people out there who you’d never rather see again. Just like the self-balancing cycle, you’ve got your fair share of assholes and angels.
Many years on and miles away from our humble beginnings, and I’m simultaneously amazed and unsurprised at just how easy it is to sit in the street and wordlessly rediscover our commonalities. Now that we’re older, the wine certainly helps.
I’m not sure what else to say here now that I’ve kind of let you in on my grand realization of the past couple of days. You may think, “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” or you may have stumbled across a similar experience. For me, I can’t tell you how validating I’ve found this rediscovery to be, and at this stage in the game of Life I kind of find this return to my crazy ass roots to be a bit reassuring. But maybe this is just a Mashpee thing.
We’ll all continue to travel far and wide in search of our own personal idiom, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll continue to appreciate the come and go reunions with people who knew you best at critical points in your life. It’s probably the best pattern that I can count on.