Looking for Answers Through My Car Window

It’s not often I take time for myself. I’m always busy working, or cutting grass, or just whatever needs being done, so those moments for myself are rare. Recently I was able to take one of those moments.
It has been a while since I visited Harris County, where I grew up. I had to visit the county to do some work for the newspaper. While I was doing that, I managed to take a few minutes for myself and do some remembering.
I managed to stop at Pine Mountain Valley Baptist Church where my family members are buried and take a moment.
Every time I visit their graves, memories begin to rush through my mind, and that is what happened this time as well. I left the graveyard and went on with my work.
As I drove I looked out my car window, and it seemed there were many things that brought back memories. Some of the memories were happy ones and some were not so happy ones.
Like just passing Moultrie Park (sports complex) and remembering coaching so many teams, umpiring and spending hours with my son and daughter on those fields, those were all happy ones.
However, riding over the bridge where my father was tragically killed was not a happy one.
Whether a good memory or a bad memory, it is important to remember those memories. They are part of our life and part of who we are. We have to go through the bad times to get to the good times, and sometimes visa versa. The good thing is, no matter what the situation, we can usually battle through it if we work at it. However, it is those battles, the memories we make with family and friends, and our desire to do better that is part of what makes us who we are also.
Sometimes, we have to realize that the bad memories may not be as bad as we remember them to be.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you sit down to family dinner, the food is good, the conversation is good and all is well. Good memory right? Then, as you prepare to clear the table you accidentally tip over your drink and it splatters all over one of the family members. The two of you will not have the same memory of that event because the spill would probably degrade the memory of the person who just had something spilled on him or her.
We need to realize that the memory doesn’t matter as much as the moment. Simply put, everything we do from one moment to the next is important to our existence and to that of those around us. Memories are just the stories of our life.
I also thought about the regrets in my life. Yes, we all have those, whether it is a project that we started and never finished, or that we spend too much time working and not enough with family, or that we never told a family member or friend who has passed on how we felt about them. No matter what the regrets are, we all have them.
Sydney J. Harris said, “Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” Meaning if we do something and regret it we can get past it, but it is the things we do not do that we have problems with.
What we most often forget is that when we reach tomorrow, today is gone and we can’t get it back. So we need to remember that old saying, “Don’t regret tomorrow what you didn’t do today.”
Taking a trip down memory lane can sometimes help us to get more focused on today. When we look back at the memories and the regrets we can begin to realize where our life began, where it is today, how much we have grown as a person, how much better we are at dealing with things and so much more.
Simply put, we can access the person we are today verses the person we were 10 years ago, 20 years ago and so on. We can determine if we are in fact a better person today or maybe not the person we really want to be. That is just the tip of the iceberg. It can also help us again determine where we are in life and where we want to be.
So, my readers, take a moment, look out the window and reflect on your life. It is amazing what you might see, and amazing what you might learn from the experience.
If I learned one thing from this, it is that Grant Ngobean got it right when he said, “Don’t live your life regretting yesterday… Live your life so tomorrow you won’t regret today.”