IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME…

“It does not do well to dwell on dreams (and memories), and forget to live…” Albus Dumbledore (Harry Potter)…

Marcel Proust’s iconic words, ‘In search of Lost Time’, have carried more significance than we care to admit as humans. For a lot of people, the life we envision ourselves having as we grow up, isn’t what we tend up having. The vibrancy and vigor of youth that fills one with dreams and aspirations eventually gives way for the pragmatism and monotony of the adult world. A life of bills, responsibility and safety for majority.

Months roll into year and we find ourselves asking where it all went? Our passions, dreams and desires. We ask ourselves how it went so fast without as much as a fight from us to go after it. We then get lost in nostalgic desires wishing for the time to go back in time to retrace our steps and right some wrongs. Vouching to ourselves how much wiser we are now to make the right choices our overbearing parents entrusted themselves to make for us.

Nature then hears our cries and our commitment of how much we’ll strive to do better than our parents because we are now wiser and more in tune with our childhood. Fate grants us the privilege of becoming parents so we can live up to our commitment of being better parents. And for a moment we are ecstatic and beside ourselves with immense joy and gratefulness for this rare opportunity to be parents. We remember all our commitments (and vows) to do better, and whisper a gentle promise to the little infant to be the best parent they can ever have.

As our children grow older, it refreshes our nostalgic thoughts of our fractured childhood and we find ourselves unable to resist the urge to re-create some memories we so much desire from our childhood, with our children. Suddenly, one memory re-creation becomes ten, and we start making more than just memory re-creation, but life choices for them.

We have suddenly become our overbearing parents we complained about but we don’t realize this yet. We are attempting to live our lost vibrant days through the lives of our children. We are making choices we wished we made when we were younger for our kids because we must be wiser than them. They are just kids and don’t know better, we remind ourselves. We don’t consider the fact the times are different, and our knowledge of teenage and adolescent years have now become antique memories and might be obsolete.

Mother Nature looks on at our drama with a relaxed smile, she has seen this play out one too many times not to know how it all ends. She has watched repeatedly how adults become parents, and begin to grasp at a lost past of their lifetime through the lives of their children and wards. ‘Humans are as fickle as they come’, she chuckles. She looks on longingly at the next batch of adults wishing to correct the mistakes of their parents, and hopes they are truly the ones that will break the cycle of parents seeking to remedy a lost period of their lives through the lives of their children or wards.