Campfyre Stories

I’ve always believed that people changing is the root of the demise of most relationships - romantic or otherwise.  We evolve, we change, we become different people than who our partner fell in love with.  But recently I’ve been thinking that maybe this isn’t entirely as true as I thought it was.

I had an opportunity this weekend to (briefly) reconnect with someone I’ve known for about 20 years, though I hadn’t seen him in about 7.  He looks 30-something, but other than that, he looks exactly the same.  The conversation moved, at one point to my stepfather’s grade school reunion (!!) and how when he renewed his association with these people they hadn’t changed a bit.

It got me thinking.  I’m not all that different than I was when I was a teenager, but I have been.  I have gone through long periods of time where I was not who I am now.  Sometimes I was trying things on, sometimes there have been situations that have caused me to adopt entirely different behaviors and integrate them into myself, if only temporarily.  The thing is, I have changed, but I’ve always come back to the same place that was apparently defined when I was much younger.

I never really believed that, though.  This idea that we’re locked into a certain personality or set of behaviors at a young age goes against much of what I believe in.  What of our experiences as we get older?  Do those count less toward our core of ourselves than the experiences and exposures of our early childhood?  The more I think about who I am now compared with who I was 20-ish years ago, the more I start to believe it. 

It’s almost depressing.  I, and I believe others, would like to think that I’ve changed for the better in the past 20 years or so, but I suppose the other side of that is that I haven’t changed for the worse.  I have the same interests and, largely, the same hobbies.  I still hold on to the majority of my core beliefs, ethics and morals that haven’t changed.  Even most of my behaviors today are the same as they were when I was a teen.  To be sure, this wasn’t the case ten years ago, but I’ve come back to it. 

I assume that everyone has had that moment where they reconnect with someone from the past and it’s as if no time at all has passed.  You immediately fall back into your familiar conversational patterns and "hot topics".  You’ve changed in some ways, of course you have, you’re older, you’re maybe wiser, you’ve had new experiences, but the inner you is still there.

This friend of mine, the more we talked (which wasn’t NEARLY enough), the more I saw pieces of him in the friends I surround myself with today.  I found myself thinking, "Wow, so-and-so would really hit it off with him because [xxx]…" and so on.  There was this kind of realization of this person from my past being the same *type* of person that I surround myself with in the present.

I do think, however, that there are those people who never really "found" themselves early on.  These are, I assume, people who need to "find themselves" later through some soul-searching or spiritual quest.  These people will be the ones who say "…and it turned out that we didn’t have anything in common anymore."  But I think the reality is that they never had anything in common before, except superficially - you know the people I’m talking about…  (I believe there is another type of person who goes through this same soul-search, those who lose themselves at some point, often in someone else…)

I don’t know…  it just gave me pause and I’ve been thinking about it for the past three days.  The real relationships, the good ones, I’ve had that have ended usually had their end in a behavior that could no longer be tolerated, but it wasn’t because I no longer felt compatible with that person.  In fact, even my marriage, which was a result of growing up and growing apart, didn’t change the things we have in common.  We’re doubling some of our efforts in teaching Spawn to…  well, let’s face it, to be a nerd (science fiction, comic books, fun with math and numbers…).  Heh.

I suppose it’s going to take more thought to come to a solid conclusion, or at least to explore the *whys* and revisit (in my head) the answers I thought I had to the nature vs. nurture debate.  In the meantime, it’s always really nice to reconnect with people who have been lost to me.