highlander hindsight.

"life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." - soren kiekegaard, danish philosopher

i find it funny how memories of the past ebb and flow in our lives. there are times when i forget who i was just a few years early...as if that period of time was a different life all together. truly this only speaks to the adage that time changes everything - our perspective, our goals, our identity. recently though the supposed "glory days" of high school have been brought to mind, again and again. what a bittersweet time.

maybe it's been triggered by all the talk surrounding my family's return home to the woods....where my kid brother will pick up where i left off - 6 years earlier. maybe it's the recent return to 90's tunes that seems to be a buzz everywhere. music has such powerful recollection effect. or maybe, just maybe, the time has come for me to introspectively examine that common thread of identity that has remained intact through all these years of change. who knows. the reality is, is that for now i'm "stuck" in the past.

earlier this week, i was browsing around on the conroe ISD website looking at the new high school david will attend in the fall. recently built back in 2005 to alleviate the overflowing original TWHS highlanders, the woodlands college park high school (TWCP cavaliers?) is an impressive "teen flick" representation of secondary school. well, at least it doesn't look like they used the same huntsville prison architect to design this one. genius. unfortunately though this town just won't stop growing.... my graduating class was 950 and david's will be 750. smaller class size? well maybe for a state like texas. welcome to the woodlands, houston's own mini-metropolis. :P

anyway, interested to see what has NOT changed, i scanned through the list of faculty both at the old and new hs's and much to my surprise, many of my teachers have stayed...and they all have websites! not much to them, but i definitely clicked on all the ones i knew just to get a glimpse of life as i knew it. i chuckled when i saw my senior english teacher's website title as "linda woods: english goddess" (and that she was...former stand-up comedian and understated drama queen). ha! and i cringed with anxiety when i found my junior english teacher's site..."English III AP summer reading: The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck; The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald - *expect a test the first week of school (this includes the first day)." TYPICAL mrs. omohundro!! oh how i dreaded that first class of the day, but oh how thankful i am to her now.

in spirit of returning to the red & green, i also located my old high school papers stored away in my "EDUCATION/TWHS" computer files. my emotions toggled back between amazement of my infant intellect and embarrassment of my so called "maturity". especially those college app essays! they are all about puffing yourself up and spinning your qualities from good to great. i laugh at my confidence and certainty in my proposed future direction. if anything rereading my words, written some 7 eventful years ago, only increased my awareness of just how much our environment molds the ideals of who we are and who we want to be.

i find this all supremely interesting, especially now that i am at a point in my life where i have made a lot of important decisions so far and am examining what equally important decisions to make in designing my future. with this recent trip down memory lane, it makes me want to boil myself down to the essence of who i am and what i want. to strip away the effects of geographical standards - to get to the core and eliminate the surrounding white noise of confusion. but surprisingly, what i have come to realize, as much i try, this effort is already thwarted before it can start. it's impossible.

i recently came to this full realization in the concluding pages of the thought-provoking book - the tipping point: "we like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and our temperament...[but] we are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us." we are who we are by what's inside us AND what's around us. we are human, we are social creatures.

just like everything in life, there are some things we can control and some we can't. past versus future? well the past cannot be changed, for then it would change who we are. but the future...it's prospects might elude us, but truly it is ours for the taking. mrs. o's website quote says it best - appropriately counteracting the dread of her class with the hope of the future.

"...if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours...if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; this is where they should be. now put the foundations under them." - hdt, walden