Sometimes I get really nostalgic. I've been rereading emails from just under a decade ago as I transfer emails from my old computer to my new computer. Although the glitches in Windows Mail have caused my sent emails to not transfer correctly, I've still been able to read enough of the threads that I remember almost exactly how I felt at the time I first opened those emails so long ago. And what turbulent times they were! Usually things look simpler in retrospect but even to this day, when I look back, situations are no more clear-cut and solutions to my problems no more evident. (Perhaps this suggests immaturity--and even correctly so, as I feel so clueless about particular things.) I remember my mind being so swelled up with thoughts of uncertainty--trying to figure out what I would do after graduation on top of being so unsure of certain personal relationships left me constantly charged with emotion. Emotions still linger, although tattered by time and rumination into some ragged, dingy form.

And, alas, now the most poignant emotion is regret. Regret that I waited too long to make amends. That I was so unable to see past certain things and unable to shake my stubbornness in particular moments to this day causes pangs of remorse. Although I don't think I would have acted any differently were I to relive those times, I cannot understand or rationally justify why I did what I did. Then there's the regret that I never pursued something I ought to have, which causes equal frustration. Filling my mind with "What if?"s and "Then what?"s is never a satisfactory endeavour. I try to consider how different things would be today and realize that, so much time having passed since, I have no reasonable guess as to how things would have ended up. I've heard that it doesn't hurt to dream, but this dream kind of hurts. Yet, I can't help but treasure those difficult times that begot my current regret. Life was fully vivid then and I felt so alive.

Of course, there's the future still--an unknown that in my naïveté I sometimes manage to rosily fill with thoughts of something better. From a logical perspective, it makes little sense to fling oneself headlong towards an unknowable and possibly fated future, and in the process, turn one's back on a past which, in contrast, can be seen so clearly and seemingly concretely explored. But this is exactly what we do: we brush today aside in the hope that tomorrow will be better--or even more boldly trust that tomorrow is better when we muster enough faith to. Yet there really is no guarantee that anything on this earth will be better for me (in any sensible consideration of what "better" means) than what I have been so fortunate to have already experienced. If I am unlucky, there never will be. And in that case, perchance some fine local maxima are yet to be experienced, but that one global maximum... was I too preoccupied with the future to stop, think, and marvel just how high it was?