Thanks for this post. What a cool synchronicity and important reminder/reinforcement. I was just thinking something along these lines last night.

It occurred to me while I was listening to this song called Vincent from Don McClean. I remembered that I had loved the song as a teen mostly because it reflected my own abiding sense of despair. Often when I hear songs that I used to listen to a lot when in the most unhappy periods of my life it pulls me back into the misery I felt then. But this time it didn't.

Instead I saw how the sense of the world passing me by, having moved from NYC to a very small "town" in southern NC a couple years earlier, was what I needed to prepare me for an adulthood of worldwide travel. It planted in me the desire to play with those at the top of their game globally, which I've done since I was 18.

I then saw how a few different elements of my childhood that had made me miserable at the time fostered in me desires that led to incredible fetes and experiences in adulthood, plus becoming someone I really like being.

In the end, we can never understand the choices someone else's spirit has made, and often they can't either. But we can secretly be at peace with it all, even if we couldn't convince anyone who isn't ready to see it.