End of an era

Earlier this week, I gave away all my roller-hockey equipment. When I first started coming off medication and learning how to make healthy decisions, I started playing rec-league hockey just for me. It was one of the first things I did simply because I enjoyed it, not because it was going to impress someone, or because it served some higher purpose, it was just fun, it helped me enjoy life a little bit.

As the years went on though, and I learned to make those sorts of decisions on a regular basis, and I got a little bit older, and slower, and busier, so I quit playing. I haven’t played since before Angela and I got married almost 4 years ago. When I heard that a woman I work with was having a garage sale to benefit her daughter’s basketball team, and that she was looking for donations, I finally looked at that old equipment sitting in our basement and said to myself “I’m not going to be playing again, I’ve gotten older, and have a different life now, and playing hockey just isn’t the priority it once was, so why not give it away?” So I did.

Of course, the funny thing is, there are still some people I work with who will ask me about playing hockey, as if I have been playing all this time. They see me as a guy who plays hockey in his spare time. Apparently, it’s never occurred to them that I might have moved on and changed over the last 5 years, or at least they’ve not bothered to notice that I’m not the same person I was 5 years ago. Makes me wonder if there are people out there who don’t grow and change over the course of 5 years or more. Seems like such a waste.