LAVINIA ZAINEA

Old Friends

     There are people you keep in touch with over the years, who become part of your life without your being aware of it. Whether you see them every few months or every few days, you simply know that they are there. You often take their existence for granted or you misjudge them, but they are like the familiar faces of your past and present. Sometimes, they change with you, sometimes they don’t. But you cannot measure yourself by them since they are always there.
     The problem comes when you bump into people you haven’t seen in years, whose existence was buried somewhere in a corner of your memory, who never grew old for you, whose destinies and personalities you arbitrarily traced to match your own vision of what they were. And then you encounter them again and the surprise lies not in what they have become, but in what you no longer thought you were. I ran across such a person a few days ago, and the shock was probably greater than I expected, because the perspective it gave me of myself was a lot clearer than I had imagined. I found out I had lost some things but discovered others, that not everything is black and white and that it is easier to judge than to delay forming an opinion. But it is very difficult to lose one’s egocentricity.
      In short, what I have found out is that there are as many angles to a problem and as many solutions as there are people, and sometimes even more, that while the past influences the present, we are no happier or sadder for living the way we have chosen, we just keep wondering “what if” because we are only human, but in reality most of us would not give up the “is” for the “if”.