How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

Wow, this prompt could get deep!

First off, just because I thought it was amusing, I wanted to share that I spent a good minute or so trying to think of a title for today’s post. Soap Opera titles like Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns came to mind because the names of these shows are so simple yet so fitting, and the content of these shows is relevant to the general question of the prompt. (For the record, I don’t watch these shows, I just know they exist because my Mom watched them.) Then I thought of the line Fry from Futurama uses in regards to the yogurt in his baseball cap. “Ya see, it used to be milk. And well, time makes fools of us all.” That’s when I decided to keep things a little higher level for my answer, rather than deep dive into my past to try and self-evaluate who I am today.

Time really does make fools of us all. Children look at the world very differently than adults, but they too eventually become adults and see the folly of their naivety.

For myself as a child the world was in some ways full of promise. Until Mom passed away. That’s the kind of major life event that drastically changes a kid. I was only 12, and while I had the concept of death in my head it didn’t seem REAL until it hit my family in such a strong way. I didn’t really know what to think after that, but the world became a little more grey and uncertain.

Then a couple years later, my Dad remarried. A few years later and we moved several hundred miles away. Two important things were instilled in me through those events. Relationships can change, and people need to keep moving forward. As much as Dad loved my Mom, he needed a partner to keep him going, and as strong a bond as I may have had with friends, those friendships couldn’t last.

As an adult I take those two things to heart. Friends have come and gone, some due to differences of opinions and others because of life choices/directions. I don’t like to think of it as “moving on” but rather “moving forward” because there’s no going back.