Maybe You Just Got Busy.
Every once in a while, you stumble back into something you haven’t done for years.
Nothing dramatic happens.
You open a book.
You walk outside.
You turn left instead of right and take the road that adds twenty minutes to the drive home.
And then something in you loosens.
Your shoulders drop.
The noise in your head thins out.
Ten minutes disappear without leaving a receipt.
And you think,
“I forgot how much I like being here.”
Not here as in the road or the porch or the chair with the book open across your knees.
Here as in this version of yourself.
That’s what has stayed with me.
Because we use the phrase “find yourself” as if a person can vanish entirely.
Maybe that’s not usually what happens.
Maybe we get layered over.
A job needs more of us.
Children need more of us.
Life doesn’t steal who you are in one clean motion.
It takes inches.
A Saturday here.
An evening there.
One year becomes five.
Five becomes fifteen.
And eventually the things that used to feel like fingerprints—the odd little pleasures and habits that were unmistakably yours—get pushed so far behind the urgent stuff that you stop noticing their absence.
Until something brings one back.
A picture.
A road.
An afternoon with nowhere else to be.
And for a moment, you don’t feel like you’ve found yourself.
You feel like you’ve been recognized.
The Clues Aren't Usually Big.
I don’t think most people wake up one morning and suddenly know who they are.
I think it happens in smaller ways.
You wander through a bookstore and end up in the same section you loved years ago.
You start talking about something that has always interested you, and an hour disappears.
You spend an afternoon doing something you haven’t done in years.
And what catches you isn’t that it feels new.
It’s that it doesn’t.
You still like this.
You still lose time here.
Some part of you still knows the way.
I’ve been thinking about that.
About how easily we confuse not doing something with no longer being someone.
Life gets crowded.
Work.
Kids.
People who need you.
Things that need doing.
And after enough years, you can become so practiced at being needed that you forget what you’re like when nobody needs anything from you.
Then you get a quiet Saturday.
A few hours with nothing written across them.
And without thinking much about it, you reach for something you used to love.
And there it is.
That small recognition.
“Oh. I still like this”.
I think those moments tell us more than we give them credit for.
The trouble is, most of us notice them…
…and then Monday comes.
The Things That Still Know You.
The older I get, the less I believe everything we’re looking for is somewhere ahead.
Sometimes it’s been sitting there for years.
A book on the shelf.
Something you used to do with your hands.
A walk you keep saving for another day.
None of these things are asking you to become someone else.
They’re just waiting to see if you come back.
And every once in a while, you do.
You pick up the book.
You take the walk.
You spend an afternoon doing something you haven’t done in years.
And something feels different.
Or maybe that’s not quite right.
Something feels familiar.
I think there’s a difference.
We spend so much time believing the next chapter requires a new version of ourselves.
Maybe it doesn’t.
Maybe some chapters begin when an old part of you gets a little room again.
I don’t know that these moments are trying to tell us anything.
I just know I notice them now.
Because every once in a while, something small brings back a feeling I hadn’t realized was gone.
And for a minute, I remember.
Not who I used to be.
Who I still am.
I’m curious...
What’s something you hadn’t done in years that made you think,
“I forgot how much I like this.”
Sometimes the smallest moments have a way of telling us more than we expected.
— Floyd