Swirling Around In My Head

This weekend I flew up to my alma mater, SUNY Geneseo for my 10th reunion celebration. I stayed with my old friend and college roommate Jeremy, his wife, and twin seven month old daughters near Rochester. I saw lots of people that I had not seen in years, and many that I had not seen since graduation actually. I had many interesting experiences over the course of the weekend, but it was much more a mental journey than anything else in many ways. When I go "back" someplace, like visiting people from Geneseo, sometimes I feel like I am emotionally traveling back to that time to an extent, and even though my years of undergrad are without doubt what gave me much of the mental strength that I have today, I often feel that strength drain when I get back in that environment. (I'm not including people like Jer who I have visited with often since graduation.) For instance, I had the strangest conversation with someone that I had not spoken to since we were in middle school together probably, aside from maybe a "hi" or two around campus when we ended up going to the same college after I decided to go to a neighboring high school. I'll get into that more some other time, as well as the conversation and why it took me back so many years. It was such a time warp. It's not that I'm a different person entirely of course since college. It's just "me plus ten years", after all. It gets me thinking though about who I am, what I want in life and why, priorities, alternate realities (something I've thought about a lot recently).

I think I have reached a couple conclusions so far. I know that others have thought these thoughts before, and I have as well, but I am finding these two magnified suddenly:

1. Much of the time, I learn what I need to know after I could have made the most use out of that information.

2. One lifetime is very limiting. I want to live a thousand lifetimes as myself and see just what I am capable of, the good, the bad, and the ugly (but mostly the good of course). I think people can do that to an extent, maybe throw a couple extra dice, but more than that is tricky. How can you tell how many sides it has, if after you throw it once, you are only told the number you rolled?