WHAT WE ARE

[Not really a story today. Just something I was thinking about. And, yes, I am behind a day.]

We do not pick our world. We are born into it and live inside it. We can craft it and adempt to make our own way, but we don't chose it.

Our family, the town of our birth, are starting station, all of these are and will always be. They shade us and craft us. They make us, shade us, lead us and fight us. As we do to them. We dwell in the false belief that who we chose as friends, what we chose to do with our lives, are entirely up to us. But while we can make choices, those choices are always influenced by what as come before. And as much as we may leave those thinks behind, they are still part of us. The make us. When you are thirty years old, the twenty-five year old, the eighteen year old, the ten year old, the three year old are all still there. Those don't disappear. We can not escape them. You can hate them, love them, fight them, accept them, come to some sort of terms with them, but they are always there

Even as time passes, even as we grow and move one, the slippery memories of the past keep all that we did not chose with us.

Our world is a collection of things that add up to the now, a ramshackle home built with a blueprint that is vague and messy and forever changing. Each moment comes from the one before it.

Our world is a fragile, dirty glass that colors what we see... for better or worse. No matter where they sit with us, we don't move beyond them. And in a moment, a second, that glass can fall, break, shatter. The thing our past, the tangible being of it can be torn form us. A series of moments that end in our past disappearing from our grasp. The physical can, all at once, not be available to us.

But it is us and always us. Not just in the cliché of “it will live un our hearts.” Not just in our memories. But they exist as us. Our world, the world we know now, can end in a beat, but the world that is us contains that previous world (and all the worlds that lead up it). And our world is in the next.

Everything has an end and that end lives as part of everything.

We do not pick our world but we can shape the next.