When my wife and I were “courting” way back in graduate school days in Tennessee, we took a trip to Fall Creek Falls on the Cumberland Plateau and hiked through the woods through a steady rain, boasting to each other about which of us had the better raincoat (learning how to share life challenges together!) and sharing an umbrella (very romantic). Some decades later, with less than two months retirement under my belt, we loaded up our campervan and headed off to Tennessee to revisit that memorable and momentous adventure. It didn’t rain on us this time (our older feet may have not been so sure on the steep and slippery trail as they were when we were younger), but the views were lovely and the landscapes evocative of our now-distant youthful excursion.
The next day, on our wedding anniversary, we traveled east to Athens, Tennessee where we stopped to see the first house that we lived in together. There used to be a kudzu forest behind it, but the forest is gone now, replaced by developments. We delighted to be there again, and remember when we were young.
There are some people who only live in the present, and have no use for melancholy excursions into the past. But I say, how can you enjoy the present, or hope for the future, if you do not care to reexamine the past and the journey that has made you who you are today?
