What stays with us through the years are the feelings. The ones that came and never really left. A life isn’t lived in years. It’s lived in moments that brand you.
A song never asks permission to remember. It just opens a door. You can be in a hardware store or driving with the windows down. Three notes come over the speaker and you are gone. You are not where you are. You are where you were. You can feel the dashboard of that first car. You can see the light coming through the curtains of a kitchen that doesn’t exist anymore. You can remember exactly how it felt to believe something without question, before life beat you down. We think we choose our soundtrack. We don’t. The soundtrack chooses us. It records us while we are busy living. Then years later, it plays us back.
We think we live in our minds, but we are animals that remember with our noses. Fresh cut grass after a thunderstorm and you are every age you ever were on a summer afternoon. Coffee in a percolator before anyone else was awake. Sawdust and Old Spice in a garage. Salt and Coppertone on a towel in the back seat. A certain soap. A certain perfume passing in a crowd. And suddenly someone you haven’t spoken to in thirty years is standing right next to you, as real as breath.
Smell has no manners. It doesn’t knock. It walks right in and says…you thought you forgot this, didn’t you.
Not a year. A season. Because a season is a feeling, not a date.
The first cool front after a long, hot summer, when the air finally thins and you can think again and you want to be outside for hours. The spring that came early when you were young and everything felt possible. The fall when things felt so empty. The winter that felt endless because someone was sick, or someone had left, and the light went low every day at four o’clock.
We say that was a long winter and we don’t mean the weather. We mean what the weather did to us. Seasons teach us that nothing stays, and that everything comes back in a different form. We don’t remember what year we learned that. We remember the season we felt it.
And then there are the days the world walked into your living room uninvited. You remember where you were standing when certain events came into your life. What the carpet looked like. Who called first. You remember the television turned up too loud. The newspaper on the driveway still in its plastic. Headlines that weren’t just news out there, but news in here. They drew a line. Some headlines told you what happened to the world. A few told you who you were going to be now that the world was changed.
I used to think if I could line up all the years in order, I would understand my life. Now I know better. The years are just the shelf. The shelf never mattered. What matters is what we chose to keep on it. A song that still tightens your throat. A smell that still brings you home. A season that still lives in your bones. And a headline that made you quietly decide what kind of person you were going to be.
In the end, I don’t so much remember the years. I remember how they felt and how those feelings never left my side.
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” – Ecclesiastes 3:1
Being About The Journey 