every seven years…

18/10/15

It is said that every seven years a human is entirely different from whom he was, because cells are in constant renewal. Our skin cells, our blood cells, everything renews constantly. Our entire body regenerates through time and seven years later it is a different self than what it was.

A week ago I had the opportunity to go on a day trip with my family; we visited the town I was born in, and where I spent most of my childhood summer and winter vacations. It’s a place filled with memories, mostly of my grandmas house. It is very different from the city I live and grew up in. It is calm, liberating, noiseless…

Before leaving this memory lane we decided to go to an ice cream place I hadn’t visited since I was ten. I remembered my favorite ice cream flavor from that exact place, and so as a usual I asked for it. I can’t even explain how horrible it was. Maybe the ice cream wasn’t the same that it was back in the old days, or maybe I was the one who had changed.

What I realized in that moment is that not only do our physical appearance changes through time, we in a whole do too. We change every day. Our points of view, perspectives, beliefs; they grow, decrease or simply become something entirely different. We become a different person through time, and some of us are afraid of that because we think change is wrong, that we’re not staying true to ourselves. We idealize staying the same forever… innocent, young, beautiful; but things are not that way.

At the end, we decide who we become. We cannot avoid change, we cannot avoid realizing how the world really is, we cannot avoid life. But we surely can choose what to be. Change isn’t bad, not if we don’t want it to.