People we haven't met...yet

I often think about things too complex and impossible to ever figure out - like how different I might be had I been raised by different parents, gone to different schools, grown up in a different country...so on and so on. It is my belief that people are shaped as much by the environment they grow up in and the people they grow up with, every bit as much as their DNA is responsible for who they are.

People are so impressionable - kind of like marshmallows, or, maybe a cake that needs just a few more minutes in the oven before completely done and when you press your finger in the center, it leaves an impression in the center that doesn't bounce back. We're all a little bit of lots of different people, places, and teachings.

Maybe we are shaped a little by the people we haven't met, the ones we create.

Photo: SPBM

“It’s true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don’t meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly. There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet. Every adult yearns for some stranger, but it is really childhood we miss. We are yearning for that which has been stolen from us by what we have become.

We are not at home in the world because we imagined it is as we have become, full of nothing but yearning and forgetting and hoping for something so raw we can’t describe it. We think of the world as the place of beginnings and ends, and we forget the inbetween, and even how to inhabit our own bodies. And then in adulthood, we sit and wonder why we feel so lost.” — Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter