You are who you've been
I used to be in a boychoir. It comprised a bittersweet experience (bitter in a good way). The transition from "boy voice" to "man voice" and graduation from the choir marked something that I intimately recall, realizing it even then, as "growing up" and a serious marker of youth unfolding, most markedly changing.
The choir I'm in is doing the Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein. A boy soprano is singing in the second movement, which we rehearsed with the orchestra on Thursday. It brought me to so many places that I could not cry. Just beautiful.
"So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop -- that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can." ~ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain, last page of the novel.
We tend to look upon youth or other things or characteristics that we once had and feel that we don't have them anymore.
Possession. Possession is so immediate. It's so right-now, so ignorant of who you are because of who you've been. Who are you?
You are you because of who you've been. If you grew up locked in a closet with no human interaction, no light, no stimulus other than the sound of food being shoved through a slot to nourish you---well, first of all you probably wouldn't survive such sensory deprivation, but second of all you would definitely not be you, you as you are right now, reading this. You would be a skeleton, a shell for a void. Unfortunately there are historical examples that show this: children left in sensory deprivation, children dying from lack of human interaction during the plague/germ-epidemic/scare, children unable to speak after seclusion and language deprivation, the list goes on.
Somehow because we age we feel that we keep loosing rather than gaining. Why?
We are who we've been. My cells have changed, my appearance and voice would not be mistaken for a boy soprano, but somehow I've managed to recapture the innocense that I let slide post-high school, post-college, and I'm reconnecting with who I've been == who I am. My cells are changing, my voice is different now, but the boy soprano that I was, the soloist with quivering pure voice, is still part of me, is still me.
To look upon youth with yearning is to not yearn for who we are now, to not love ourselves, and most importantly it is to forget that we are who we've been. Hold onto that thought: you are who you've been.
The choir I'm in is doing the Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein. A boy soprano is singing in the second movement, which we rehearsed with the orchestra on Thursday. It brought me to so many places that I could not cry. Just beautiful.
"So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop -- that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can." ~ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain, last page of the novel.
We tend to look upon youth or other things or characteristics that we once had and feel that we don't have them anymore.
Possession. Possession is so immediate. It's so right-now, so ignorant of who you are because of who you've been. Who are you?
You are you because of who you've been. If you grew up locked in a closet with no human interaction, no light, no stimulus other than the sound of food being shoved through a slot to nourish you---well, first of all you probably wouldn't survive such sensory deprivation, but second of all you would definitely not be you, you as you are right now, reading this. You would be a skeleton, a shell for a void. Unfortunately there are historical examples that show this: children left in sensory deprivation, children dying from lack of human interaction during the plague/germ-epidemic/scare, children unable to speak after seclusion and language deprivation, the list goes on.
Somehow because we age we feel that we keep loosing rather than gaining. Why?
We are who we've been. My cells have changed, my appearance and voice would not be mistaken for a boy soprano, but somehow I've managed to recapture the innocense that I let slide post-high school, post-college, and I'm reconnecting with who I've been == who I am. My cells are changing, my voice is different now, but the boy soprano that I was, the soloist with quivering pure voice, is still part of me, is still me.
To look upon youth with yearning is to not yearn for who we are now, to not love ourselves, and most importantly it is to forget that we are who we've been. Hold onto that thought: you are who you've been.