change

People change. Sometimes people don’t change.
Buildings get torn down. Empty spaces get filled. Sometimes they don’t.
As I see the layers of my past amid the buildings and friends who still hang around my life, I like to think I can make predictions. Somehow the idea that I can comforts me. But it is not real. I can be sure only that new things will come, old things will change, and some things will remain just the same. By the time my predictions come true, it doesn’t matter anymore that I made them.
One thing I always forget to predict is how small the places from my memory seem when I see them again. My nostalgia stretches things out so that they can wrap the whole world up in one event, one view, and one night. I go back to a courtyard entrance of a building made up of cheap studio apartments, and I seem like a giant. How did such big things happen in such a tiny, dingy place? How did the smell stick with me for all these years? How did my life get so shaken in a building that still stands?
I went back to my old Junior High school the other day. I walked up the same steps I walked up to sneak back into class almost twenty years ago. It seem so monumental, until I realize that kids who ended up dying in World War Two walked up those same steps before me. I wonder how small that playground seems to them now.
Time is amazing. A lifetime seemed so huge a few years ago. And now, like the apartment building, it seems a little smaller than I remember. But that is only when I look forward without remembering how much I have been able to do in the portion I have already explored.
Today I am nostalgic and excited. I have so much love in my heart for all the people in my life. I am so proud of my friends and my family. I am so happy that I still have so many people to meet, and things to see. As the buildings around me change, and take on new stories, I see it as a reflection of the changes in my own life. And while it is fun sometimes to remember what used to occupy the spaces, it never seems to give me any better ability to predict what will come next.
Thank God.