Blast from the past

A recent blog visitor somehow ended up looking at a post I published over two and a half years ago titled Integration. Every once in a while, I go back and read an old post or two. Re-reading this one was interesting in various ways: the changes, the growth I had forgotten about, the growth since then, aspects of it I can see cyclically, the comments from voices which still pipe in from time to time but knowing how much has changed for each of us since then...the past can be a helpful reminder and teacher to clarify and inform the present. That's one big reason I journal. Though I hope the stuff I post here (as opposed to keeping in my private journal) is helpful to others in some way, there's value in just writing privately to organize your thoughts and, perhaps, to look back and remember where you've been from time to time, to see the thoughts you were free to express where you figured nobody else would read them. I keep meaning to finish transcribing my mission journal. Even though I don't see eye-to-eye with myself back then, I see value in retaining records of my whole, integral life up to this point.

On a side note, I guess that's part of why I never eliminate photos of past loves, infatuations, or friends or destroy journal entries in an effort to forget. It would be easier, in some ways, to just burn it all and leave it behind and try to forget it, but I feel like that would be another unnecessary and unhealthy fracture, a denial of what has brought me to where I am and what makes up the person I am. Despite having to take a break or get away from time to time, or acknowledge when a relationship or phase has run its course and move on, there's no point in pretending I haven't been where I've been, believed what I've believed, or loved whom I've loved. That's all part of the story of "me", which I'd kinda like to keep as intact and as "real" as possible. OK, end of side note.

Anyway, I can't help but smile when I find that a reader has pored over my archives, stopping here and there to read bits of my journey, as one reader in southern Utah did a few weeks ago and has been stopping in regularly ever since. Hi, there. I don't know if I know you, but I hope you've gleaned something from it. I know I enjoyed re-reading a couple of the posts you seemed to pause on.

In short, this blog exists for a reason or two, so I'm glad some of you read old posts. I still want to go through and tag old posts and make a guide of posts relevant to certain questions, more for my own benefit and reflection than for other people's (I don't flatter myself that much, folks; my readership is pretty small). I'll get around to it someday, maybe.