Move forward, don't look back
Written March 15 but saved till the movie's run ended so there'd be no wories about spoilers :)
A friend had free tickets to a screening of The New World, so we went last night.
I was on tenterhooks for Pocahontas to choose the other guy, John Rolfe. Choose the guy who loves you, my mind screamed. The one who really cares for you and has been so tender to you!
She did. And then I realised that I shouldn't have worried. Coz it makes perfect sense.
Agnes Keith, in her book Three Came Home (an account of her experiences in a Japanese prison camp in Sarawak during World War II) said that had she chosen to leave Sabah before the war broke out -- as many had advised her to do -- she would never have been able to be with her husband Harry again after the war had ended. The impression I got was that the war experience had left them so changed that, if she had not shared in the experience, she, unchanged, would be meeting a Harry who was now so changed that there would exist a gulf of understanding between them. (And perhaps Agnes would not have been able to forgive herself if she had allowed herself to enjoy the comfort and safety of home whilst her husband went through the suffering and deprivations of the prison camp.)
In the same way, Pocahontas, having known & married John Rolfe and borne him a child, was no longer the same person she had been years ago when John Smith had left. She just didn't realise it. She was clinging to a memory, but when she met John Smith again and compared him to that memory, he didn't measure up coz she now saw him through different eyes.
She was so far removed from that once carefree Pocahontas who frolicked in the fields of tall grass that it was impossible -- nay, ridiculous -- to even dream of going back to that time once again. When John Smith spoke of that idyll, she looked at him and saw a stranger.
Smith still saw her as that long-ago laughing girl, but that wasn't who she was anymore and she would never be that girl again. He was hung up on a fantasy; he didn't really care about her. And so she realised that her true love was her husband, who knew her and loved her for who she was, who had never failed her, but had always been there for her when she needed him.
You can never go back. That's why I'm always upfront about my age; I can never go back, and I don't want to go back. Many women are coy about their age, but I see it as a fact of life, and I don't ever want to be 16, 18, 21 or even 25 again. I made enough mistakes at each of those ages and had quite enough grief (without being over-dramatic about it) that I don't want a reprise. Whatever I've gone through has made me into the person I am now, and I'm thankful to be here.
I don't believe in looking back wistfully at "the good old days". However much you try, you'll never be able to recreate them. My standard practice used to be to live in the present and look forward to the future, but since at the moment my future seems to be in limbo and I have no plans whatsoever (especially career-wise), I've amended that. Now I'm simply living in the present and taking each day as it comes.