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The People Who Remember Us · Living & Learning with Aundria McMillan Humphrey

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to Living & Learning with Aundria McMillan Humphrey.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is episode 35, The People Who Remember Us.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm recording this from the hills of Logan, Ohio.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sitting in an exquisite lodge surrounded by acres of lush green forest
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: and manicured green lawn.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: There are different levels of wraparound decks,
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Sunshine, a gentle breeze, and all around me, the sound of my family.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Voices, laughter, stories, children playing, not a chance of quiet time anytime soon.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: So this is recorded with lived life in the background.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're gathered here for a mini McMillan family reunion, four generations of us.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And sitting here,
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: listening to the chatter, I've been thinking about the people who remember us.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Not simply people who remember our names or recognize our faces.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the people who remember versions of us that no longer exist anywhere except in memory.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Something rather extraordinary happened to me last week.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: I received a Facebook Messenger message from a woman I didn't know.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: She had seen me on Facebook and contacted me because her father is my first cousin.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: A cousin I haven't seen in my entire adult life.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly, there we were, reconnecting after all these years.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: He's 84 now, just a few months older than I am.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: But when I think of him, I don't immediately think of an 84-year-old man.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think of a little boy.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: In particular,
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think of the little boy whose finger I smashed
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: when we were children cracking open black walnuts in our grandmother's backyard.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, apparently I was making an impact on people's lives even then.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not just necessarily the kind of Impact I recommend today.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And now,
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: more than seven decades later,
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: there we were, two people who had lived entire lives apart, talking again.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: I found that astonishing,
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: because he remembers a little girl who existed long before the woman I am today,
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: before the careers, before marriage and motherhood, before books and podcasts.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Before Ageless Living.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Before all the losses and discoveries and reinventions that have shaped me.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: He knew me somewhere near the beginning.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And now, just days after that reconnection, here I am surrounded by family.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: There are people here whom I remember as children who were now grown with children of their own.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: There are siblings and cousins whose lives I know instantly,
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: although time has left its signature on all of us.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Gray hair, lines around the eyes, bodies that move a little differently, and stories.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, do we have stories.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Someone begins with, do you remember when?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly the years collapse.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I've been noticing.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: There are people in our lives who carry pieces of our story That we don't carry ourselves.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: They remember something we said,
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: something we did,
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: how we behaved when we were six,
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: who we were at 25,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: how frightened we were during a difficult time,
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: how brave we were when we didn't know we were being brave.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: They remember our mischief, our dreams, our mistakes, our laughter.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they even remember things about us that we've completely forgotten.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: In that sense,
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: perhaps the people who have traveled portions of our lives with us become custodians
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: of pieces of our history.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And every once in a while, if we're fortunate, we meet again, and they hand a piece back.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: But there it is, evidence of another self we once inhabited.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: I've spent a great deal of time lately thinking about becoming.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Who am I now?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: What is still waiting to be lived?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: What wants to emerge next?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Those are questions I love.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: But this weekend has reminded me that becoming doesn't happen by leaving all
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: of our former selves behind.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: They're still here,
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: that little girl,
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: the young woman,
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: the mother, the teacher, The woman who got things terribly wrong sometimes.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: The woman who got back up.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: The woman who surprised herself.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: All of them have traveled with me.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the people gathered around me this weekend knew one or another
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: of those moments and of that woman.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps that's one of the gifts of reconnecting with people from our past.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: They don't just remember us.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: They Remember us.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: They help put pieces of us back together.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: They remind us that this person we are becoming didn't suddenly appear.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: She's been arriving for a very long time, and we do this for other people, too.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: We carry pieces of their lives.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there is someone in your life whom you haven't seen for years.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Someone whose name still makes you smile.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Someone you remember before they became whoever the world knows them to be today.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps there's a story about them that only you still carry.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's time to hand it back.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Send the message.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Make the call.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Tell the story.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Say, I remember when.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because we don't know how much time any of us has.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps we shouldn't wait for reunions or the sudden awareness of our mortality
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: to bring us back to one another.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Right now I'm sitting here listening to generations of McMillans talking and laughing around me.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Soon we'll scatter again to our different corners of the world.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: But for these few days,
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: we are together,
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: remembering, reconnecting, meeting one another again as the people we have become.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps discovering that beneath all those years,
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: there's still something wonderfully familiar.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps becoming isn't always about discovering someone new.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's about being reminded of someone we've been all along.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: This has been Living & Learning with Aundria McMillan Humphrey.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening and taking this walk down memory lane with me.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: I will be here again next Monday and look forward to having you here with me.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Until then, I send you love, light, and gratitude.