i'm feeling so much righter now

"A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.
To live is to be slowly born."

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Last night, instead of blogging, I sat with my parents on their bed and watched myself grow up.  Two heavy photo albums sat at the foot of the bed as I hungrily turned the pages of whichever third one remained sitting in my lap.  The first one chronicled my life from the womb to my first birthday, the second lasted until Daria was born, and the third the first few years of my life with a sister.

As I turned each page, experienced the first months of my existence, I watched my parents.  In the beginning, when my dark-haired dad would wear UC baseball caps and t-shirts, I saw in him these flashes of unparalleled youth -- he was practically a college student, a baby.  Perhaps it was just his youth juxtaposed next to seventeen years later, but I found myself realizing that I am closer to my parents' age when they had me than they are now.

I thought about the seamlessness with which I have grown.  I turned the pages of each photo album, and I went from a squishy, nondescript newborn to a little bald infant with blue eyes that would soon turn green.  My body slowly grew to match the size of my head, which had sprouted white-blond hair, and I lost some of the baby fat that padded the falls that I soon would learn to eliminate from my everyday toddling.  But in none of the pictures did I see a dramatic leap from one stage of my life to the other.  Only when I flipped backwards a few pages at a time did I even witness a noticeable change.

I guess it's the same with picking out the pictures from middle school that will go in our end-of-the-year senior video.  I look at my seventh grade self, awkward and gangly, with dirty blond hair, long and limp, and an overbite that seemed only to exist to accentuate my awkwardness.  I look at these pictures, and I can scarcely believe how immature, how lame I was.  And yet I remember in vivid detail the first day I hung out with my best friend, our eighth grade trip to Chicago, my sixth grade overnight trip to Camp Kern.  I remember being this person, and I remember doing things, and I remember thinking that I was as mature as I could possibly be.  And yet every year, I would look back on the year before, thinking about how weird I was, about how I lacked the social graces that everyone seemed to possess.

Perhaps becoming mature isn't being all-knowing and understanding social situations and not embarrassing yourself.  Perhaps being mature is simply accepting the fact that there is always, always somewhere to go.  Even if things are bad, they will get better.  And even if I am feeling like I could not be cooler, I will probably look back on myself in two years and realize that I am far from it.  Maybe I should focus less on maturity now, and focus more on being the person that I am constantly becoming.

"Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself."