Recently, on Pinterest, I saw this wonderful quote. “Don’t look back. You’re not going that way.”

This quote held in my mind especially since I am home at my old stomping grounds. It’s easy for me to get caught up in the memory of things, in the past films that play through my head as I wander places that hold years of time. Things change, obviously, but I sift through the memory of them like watching old movies, reminiscing times that will never be again.

I take a walk through the university campus near my house and find a seat along a concrete wall to people watch. It’s Sunday night. The sky is dark but lit with street lamps overhead as the buzz of young faced college kids begin their journey. I overhear a girl fighting with her boyfriend on the phone, their relationship strained because they attend different schools and have incompatible schedules. I see a cute couple holding hands and wonder if they’ll make it to the end of the month. Or maybe, like a few rare friends of mine, this will be the one—at eighteen they have met the person they will marry.

Young people are everywhere. Girls saunter by in scantly clad shorts that beg for even my attention. What it would be like to go back and do it over again knowing what I know now? Who was I at eighteen?

I walk past a row of dormitories and remember my brother and me scanning the dirt for pennies or dimes dropped near the laundromat, excited to find treasures we could trade in for Fudgesicles on the walk to the swimming pool.

So much passes away like sand slipping through an hourglass. Blink and it’s gone.

The bridge we used to cross to get to the pool is gated shut. The bridge we walked ten thousand times. The bridge we mastered.

Ivy has grown over covering the memory of that day we were convinced the bones we discovered, buried in the underpass, were human.

I turn around and make my way back towards the dorm’s yellow lantern lights. My eyes scan the ground out of habit even though I have been absent for years. They catch on a dry yellow pod. I know in an instant that the three indentions along the body house tiny round seeds with brown rings around them, like iris demarcations. I know this because when I was a kid I broke them open at the seams and collected the tiny eyeballs pretending they were magic beans.

As I watch the magic bean pod, I am hit with the overwhelming yearning to be a kid again. I know they say not to look back, and I’ve definitely had friends who wanted to grow up and be an adult since we were seven. But I can’t help but remember the magic of being a kid, the wonder with which I looked at the world.

The truth is that the magic and wonder has never gone. In our busy lives we may overlook what is presently around us. It is true that we cannot go back in time, but we can enjoy the things that are in our lives right now.

Take a moment today to reconnect to something you loved as a child.

Is a memory, a moment, a feeling, a particular color, taste, or texture?

In what way is that magic and wonder still present in your life today?

With Love,

Z :)