Throwback Thursday

It’s amazing to me how much traction this whole idea of “Throwback Thursday” has gotten, but I guess it shouldn’t be that shocking. We spend the entirety of our youth trying to grow up too fast, and the entirety of our older years remembering the “glory” of our youth, and wishing we could go back. I pull up my Facebook newsfeed on Thursday mornings and I’m transported back to the ’70s (an era I don’t even have personal recollections of) or the ’80s, or the ’90s.

Some people should honestly be embarrassed by those pictures of yesteryear, but everyone seems to have embraced it, no matter how horrible their hair was, no matter how revolting the clothing choices were, and despite how fuzzy it all looks from this far away in time. They have all dug deep into those archives to find arguably the worst possible pictures of themselves to share. And then it hits me that nostalgia works that way. We see things a lot differently with distance.

I’ve fallen victim to it too, posting some less than pristine photos of my younger self during different awkward stages in my life (who am I kidding? I’ve always been awkward at every stage). And the responses on those photos is incredible. So many people don’t even recognize me, like in this picture here. Or they remember me during that time period and only then, like in a lot of my high school pictures. People who haven’t seen me in a long time fit into this category too, and I know I do that with other people and their older photographs when I haven’t seen them in a while.

We embrace those memories and those pictures because they show us at a point when we were still forming who we were going to be, where we were going to end up. And now that we have perspective in our rear view mirrors, it’s good to look back on where we came from and breathe a huge sigh of relief. Just imagine how we’ll be in another 20 years looking back on today’s pictures and memories.

Sam