years of memories

Yesterday I went through some of the millions of things that need to be sorted through, taken to Brooklyn or given or thrown away. (I seem to have been doing this forever and feel like I am making no progress.) I found a page on which I had written, about two years ago, 25 things I wanted to do before I died. One of them was "live in Brooklyn." Hmm. The others seemed quite unlikely, but I saved that piece of paper anyway. You never know.
Then I found a large envelope labled "letters from the early 90s." Why did I save these? I wondered. But then I started reading them and was riveted. Some of my friends could really write! They were wrestling with very large questions, and seemed to have time to explore them at length in prose. I couldn't help thinking as I read them that we all seemed to be more interesting people then, in our early and mid-20s. The big issues in life were still up for grabs: where to live, whether to choose the dull job with the potential to make lots of money or the interesting but badly paid thing. And men. Lots of discussions about relationships, what we wanted from them, who we were, really. These people are married now with children and real jobs, most of them, normal lives. It's just another stage of life; you can't be adrift and living on potential forever; at some point you have to decide, to move forward in some direction. It's natural to become more settled and boring.
But perhaps the letters touched me because I again feel like this. My life had been so incredibly settled: my my OK job, little house, my little life. Now everything has cracked open; everything seems possible again, anything might happen, both good and bad. It's both scary and exciting. But it is not boring.
At some moments if I could just wave a magic wand and undo the events of the recent months I would do it in an instant. I think, I am not brave enough, I am not interesting enough, I can't handle all this. But, obviously, no such magic wand exists, so there is no choice but to go forward and hope you can somehow be equal to it.