[Time For A Change - Split Enz]
You’ll have to excuse the pause, I got busy moving my life back to the beautiful british isles after my escapades in foreign lands. And then i needed to think of something to write about so rather than scour the bbc, i decided to draw inspiration from my own musings.
I recently started talking to an old friend of mine online. We haven’t spoken, in over 5 years, and it was nice to catch up and see how we’d grown. We both got older, moved out of houses, got careers/degrees, partners, bills, lives. We made commitments, promises to ourselves and others. Met new people, made new friends, lost old ones, learned hard (and easy) lessons. We changed. Our worlds moved on and we adapted to circumstances. They got bigger, our horizons expanded. We came out of situations wiser, smarter for the experiences. We travelled, made memories, made mistakes; learned about others and about ourselves. We fulfilled dreams, our hopes became more real; so did our fears. We learned about how the world really worked. In short, we looked in the mirror, and saw someone more than those two young people, who laughed and joked, chatted about the mundane and the important, shared hopes and fears, argued and fought over nothing and everything. We weren’t the same. At least we didn’t think we were.
We spoke, briefly, it was like falling back into an old habit. Like a pair of shoes that you just stopped wearing one day, and were excited to find that when you put them on again, they were just as comfortable, just the same as they had been before. You were different, but nothing about them had wavered. We’d grown, become adults with real lives and real respnsibilites. We saw the world black and white and grey as it was, and moved within it, and it affected our view points. We were different but our friendship had been put on pause. Talking again, we weren’t our new adult selves, who had bills and worries and constraints, we were those young people, looking into the future and wondering what fun we could have and what experiences lay ahead. Suddenly there was real life, and friendship life. One plodded on as normal, the other was a blissful escape, something unimportant, it meant nothing to anyone and we could just be who we had been before we were thrown into the world. But it was different too, we had changed and were stronger and better for our experiences, but the fake world of friendship lapsed over into the real world too often. And when the real world came around, our old upsets came to the surface. The problem with putting a friendship on pause, is that it’s not only the fun feeling of ease that gets stopped. It’s the old annoyances that come back before long too. The unresolved conflicts are the first to raise their heads.
A lot of people say that people don’t change. They try to change, they hope to change, they are a different person today than they were yesterday. And tomorrow they’ll be different again, but essentially, you are what you are. You might be better, worse, stronger, weaker for your adventures. You might have better stories to tell, better memories, but you aren’t necessarily wiser. You might have stared fear in the eye and come out the other side but you’re not necessarily braver. You’ll approach things differently, look at them from your new perspective, but you’ll make the same decision today as you would have done ten years ago, because your gut instincts are the same. Your brain can do what it likes, but underneath, your id, your driving force, your “pscyhe” didn’t change. Subconsciously, we’re still now the people we were before we wore a mask to protect ourselves. We can cover it up, lie and joke, seem smarter, pull on all our knowledge to convince others that we’re different, but were not really. You might seem stronger now, but it’s plausible you were just as strong before, that you’d just had nothing to test it. You might be funnier, calmer, hapier, more optimistic, but that’s just part of who you’ve always been.
I’ve always joked that there’s every chance I have split personality disorder, every now and then I approach things differently, depending on my mood and state of mind. One day I search for danger, one I want to stay home where I’m nice and safe. I look at what I’ve done so far, and I feel better, but talking to my old friend I realised that I’m not different at all, just enhanced. Some things burn more brightly because of what’s happened over the years, some things less. One thing is for certain, I want the same things now as I did then, I think the same as I did then, I feel the same as I did then. Which is why me and my old friend are not speaking again. We both remembered what we knew before and somehow forgot: that even though we’ve changed, even though we’ve grown and become more mature, created lives for ourselves and started our own paths into that so-called destiny that lies ahead, the reason that we haven’t been friends for so long is that the people we were then couldn’t be friends. And the people we are now aren’t different enough to change that.
