[Redway]

Anyway, as far as my own childhood goes different people will remember me in different ways, because I’m that sort of person who’d evolve in certain observable areas every year but for the most part I was consistently on the quieter side and reasonably well-behaved but not as perfectly so as some people might remember. I had a short temper that got me in trouble once or twice in Sunday school but certain aunties who viewed you through a very particular lens and saw you as this perfect child who couldn’t put a foot wrong obviously won’t remember that. And that’s something worth remembering in general. People tend to evolve more than they become completely different people, despite changing personas. Hindsight and only seeing the better elements to a particular person at any one time often makes you remember these things and people as uniformly better than what they were. There’s good and bad to someone in every stage of their life (I’m going off on one here but this is something that comes up a lot, so I’m just saying).

Nobody’s perfect and nobody ever was. But what we are is complex and not known in our entirety to any one person if that person isn’t super-close to us. I don’t look at someone and see someone who’s morphed into someone 101% unrecognisable, for good or bad, compared to how they were as a kid. They might’ve indeed changed a lot and people do change over time but I also chalk half of it down to the fact that I just hadn’t seen one particular side/incipient side to any one person and that particular point. People have different sides to their personality that don’t just come from nowhere. And that’s going to happen whether it’s entirely consistent with the version of them you remember during one particular point in their childhood or not.

As a kid I mapped onto the quiet-humble (to older adults) and quirky radars (to a lot of people closer to my age) in equal measure. More quiet and respectful than your average boy but that was just one side of me. The other side wasn’t taken too well until that quirkiness changed to ‘reserved with a bit of street savviness’. That’s something that naturally changed completely. But when you deep the holistic view you still get an image of one person. Things evolve and change but on a natural path.

That’s enough philosophising for a Sunday morning anyway.