Success
Yesterday I came across the idea that success is when you can look in the mirror and say that the 18-year-old version of you would not be disappointed by you.
To check this and to imagine myself as my 18-year-old me, I read into my journal that I started exactly 11 years ago, in August 2013.
A few things stuck out to me:
Relationships that have changed a lot since then feel very far away.
Relationships that have just become more distant and groups of friends that have never met again in this constellation still feel somewhat present, just because the relationships haven't changed significantly, and probably also because I haven't changed much in the way that I would meet these people today.
There was one group of friends in particular with whom I went to a local poetry slam every month. This experience still feels utterly real, probably also because it repeated many times. But fascinatingly, with just a few keywords for some of the most memorable performances, I still remember the mood of some of them.
I also remember many of the people I met only briefly back then and to which my relationship never changed but who I simply never met again. I feel overwhelmingly grateful for them and their individual characters that left an impression on me.
Back then I also got the idea that to get the most out of good moments in life, one must actively store them in memory, by systematically recalling them 10 minutes later, 30 minutes later, 2 hours later, 6 hours later, half a day later, a day later, a week later, and so on.
I did that with one moment when I stood in front of a large window in a Sauna building, looking out into the dark blue evening sky. Reading just the short note of it immediately brings me back into the feeling of it and it triggers joy that travels through my eyes into my nose.
This strong joy is something new that I probably didn't experience back then.
Some aspects of my life today would probably be difficult to understand for my 18-year-old self, but similarly some aspects of my 18-year-old life are difficult to understand for me today.
But this idea of actively storing good moments in memory... that's a good one that I somehow forgot about and only used once.