05/21/2025 (Home Day 3): Nostalgia and the Journey

Today I tried to immerse myself in the usual small town rituals I’m used to when I visit, topped with a little nostalgia. 

Something I can definitely appreciate more now that I’m older is that small town hospitality. I go get a haircut and the hairdresser remembers me from a year ago. The local coffee shop is delicious and the baristas are friendly. There’s no lines, and no rush whenever I want or need to do anything, and it just feels less stressful and time consuming in general. 

I even took a detour on the way home to drive by my old grade schools and reminisce on my old commute and how much things have changed while staying the same. One thing that came to my mind was how the high school is where Caleb’s and my journey together began all those years ago. From art class together to study hangouts with friends, that’s the place where our friendship blossomed into the love that we have now. And even though it wasn’t the perfect story, it’s ours, and if it had gone even slightly differently, there’s a chance we wouldn’t even be here now. 

Things have a way of happening in the most unexpected ways, whether it’s the timing or a complete wrench in your life plans. It’s funny how when we’re young, we’re so sure of where we’re going and what’s going to happen, as if the universe has handed us the reins and wished us the best. But as we get older, we learn and change in so many ways that our younger selves would have never foreseen. 

I was talking to my hairdresser today about how our twenties feel like those carefree years, and how our thirties are supposedly our best years, depending on who you talk to. Then she told me that she knew a man who believed that his forties had been his best years. So maybe some of us start to figure it out in our thirties, or maybe that’s when we start to take things too seriously, and then our forties are actually the years where we finally find the balance between fun and seriousness. No matter if this is really true, the real truth is we have no idea if we’ll live long enough to find out. 

So I guess we just have to assess the evidence we have in the here and now and decide if we’re on the right track or if we still have a long way to go. Either way, in the end it’s the journey that actually matters, because the destination may always be a place that’s forever out of reach.