Mommy, I need to grow up faster

Well, you are having a birthday soon.

Des having a birthday make you grow up?

Yes, every birthday makes you a year older.

It’s really important that I grow up faster. I was talking to God about it.

What would you do if you were grown up?

I would do everything you do.

Like me? What do I do that you want to do?

Well…I want to be a super hero.

You are getting bigger every day, don’t worry. Maybe you will get to be a superhero

I have superhero costumes!

Yes you do!

Seth Godin declares that there is no more mass culture anymore, and I believe it. So why do I feel like I’m being trite by having so many mass-culture-reference blog posts in a row?

Maybe the New Year is one of the few remaining cultural touchstones. Yes. The world is still spinning.

It’s not new to have resolutions and examine one’s life in January.

We’ve been cleaning out our garage. Such masses of STUFF that I must sort through. I confess I am a notebook hoarder. I feel deeply uncomfortable if I don’t have a notebook with me at all times. And I can’t bear to throw them away. Some delicious poems or essays are in these pages.

And there are a lot of to do lists. These papers don’t need to be in my life anymore.

So I can tear out the to do lists and phone messages scribbled in my notebooks.

Digging deeper into my boxes of papers, I even found old college syllabuses and term papers.

Time machine.

Reading again, I see that professor was saying something encouraging. “If you can expand on this topic, you’ll really have something…”

I remember at the time interpreting that to mean ‘as it stands you have nothing…’

Silly me. I’m not going to write that paper on transcendentalism again, but maybe I’ll learn to be gentler on myself.

Oh crap, look at this. A performance review from several jobs ago. I remember this one. My first ‘needs improvement’ ever.

Ever.

AND HE WAS SO WRONG!!!

I was shocked at the unfairness of that manager. He was peeved over a serious of other things that weren’t going his way, and he took it out on me so hard. I could barely believe it. In fact, I carried the memory of that review around like a trophy of horror. I told friends and co-workers, repeating it and fully expecting gasps of “he didn’t!”

I got them. I got affirmation I prompted them for.

What I didn’t do? Fight the unfair review at the time. I didn’t refuse to sign it. I should have. That’s the real lesson of that unfair review.

So now…more than a decade later…I still have that review. Like a dark shadow, saved and treasured in my garage.

What a foolish thing!

I flipped through the pages, remembered how it had shocked me at the time. Then I walked out to the recycle bin and dumped it.

Some old memories and acquaintances can be forgot.

It’s okay to make room for the memories that have a better return on investment.

I still have friends from that old job. And from the jobs that followed. I don’t need to spend another minute nursing an old wound.

It would be better spending time with my college friends, the transcendentalists. Emerson provides better food for contemplation:

“Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”

So if you want to make resolutions for this New Year, go for it. More than anything, dive in. Look at this delicious smooth-surfaced year we have to play in! There will be old friends and new, adventures and doubtless a few regrets.

And always our each and glorious individual self to carry through. I am so ready to toss the ballast and make more room for my best self.