Episode 12: The Stack of Coasters

In order to tell this story, I have to give a couple pieces of background information.
First thing is that my wife and I, one of the things that we like to do, or we've done throughout several years,
is we like to go to try new craft breweries.
I've always been a big beer guy. I like beer.
When I got turned on to craft beer, gosh, I don't know, 12, 13 years ago was when I kind of got into that scene.
Since then, you know, it's a hobby of ours.
We'll go specifically to a town and maybe stay overnight.
If the town has three or four breweries in them, we'll try to do, make the round, you know, do samplers, all that kind of stuff.
So we very much enjoy going to do that.
And often when we go to breweries, she will grab a coaster and just tuck it inside of her purse or a jacket or whatever.
And we'll take that with us.
It's kind of like a, like a memento.
And in fact, a couple of times she's, she's framed them and put them around the house,
like maybe framed, you know, a collection of them and put them into a single frame or a shadow box or whatever.
And kind of, you know, we'll hang that on the wall.
And it's kind of a nice, nice reminder of places that we've been.
And we have some cool ones.
We've got ones from Denmark and Norway and other places like that.
It's been a, it's been kind of a fun thing to do over the years.
The second piece of information or piece of background that I need to share is that I have always, I've always considered my wife to have had more variety in life experiences than I have.
I don't know if it's entirely fair.
It could just be sort of a grass is always greener phenomenon going on.
I have had plenty of experiences throughout the course of my life too, but they've been different experiences.
You know, she went to school in cities, largely.
I went to school in more rural areas and suburbs.
She had a series of career or a series of jobs within her career.
I've had much fewer, at least since becoming, you know, sort of more career oriented, you know, just different, different life paths until we came together.
And so I've always kind of looked at that and been like, well, gee, it would have been nice for a couple of years to have lived in a city.
It would have been nice to do X, Y, and Z kind of stuff.
Those were not the choices that I made along the way.
But, you know, you kind of always look at that like, oh, I wonder what it would have been like to have lived in New York for a year or two.
But the main thing is not necessarily, I'm using living in a city as example, but the overall point is that I've always kind of attributed her with this idea that she has had a larger number of experiences, maybe more veracity of experiences than I have.
So, again, not sure it's fair, but that's just always kind of stuck in my head.
So one night we're sitting on the couch.
So one night we're sitting on the couch and she's going through a box of stuff.
I think it was a box in the garage, you know, something that hadn't been looked at in a while, whatever.
And she's opening up the, you know, just pulling, pulling things out that were in there.
I think it was from her, it was a box from her old house before we had moved in there.
I mean, it's been sitting in the garage, you know, that long.
And she pulls out this huge bag of, actually two or three bags, like giant Ziploc bags of coasters, of like beer coasters.
From all sorts of different, looked like different breweries and things like that.
Looked like the kinds of coasters that over time she had been collecting when we went to breweries.
But there were so many of them.
The quantity was just enormous.
And I was thinking to myself, I was thinking, wow, there's, that's not our coasters.
There's no way.
It's too many.
I mean, the sheer quantity was staggering.
And, you know, she kind of pulled them out of the bag and stacked them up.
I'm looking at this pile of coasters and I'm thinking to myself, you know, I thought that this was a thing that we had done together.
Right.
It was kind of a, kind of a, a thing in our relationship that we had done together, exclusively something that was just ours.
But I'm looking at this stack and I'm going, oh, I guess she had done this before.
Like, I guess she had gone, we were both previously, or we were each previously married.
So I was thinking to myself, she must have been doing this.
She must have done this as well with, with her ex-husband or maybe with friends along the way.
But I was, I was mistaken, right?
I thought that this was something she had started with the beginning of our relationship when, in fact, it appeared as if she had been doing this for quite some time.
And it's irrational, but this kind of made me sad, right?
It made me think a little bit about, you know, I thought it was kind of our thing, but I guess it wasn't.
And it's totally irrational viewpoint, right?
It doesn't matter if it started with us or continued with us or anything.
It doesn't matter how we got there.
It's still a thing that we do together.
It's just that for whatever reason, I was kind of thinking to myself, gee, I, I, I really thought this was something that we, we had done together to, to begin with.
So I forget if this was a day or two later, or if it was later that evening or what.
I think it might have been later that evening.
I didn't say anything about this, right?
I didn't, like, bring up, like, oh, gee, I guess you've been doing this for a while.
It was just kind of a thing that was rolling around in my head, and I just kind of, I just, you know, kind of tossing around in there.
And every now and then throughout the course of the night, I'd kind of look over at this stack of coasters and just be like, you know, wow, I really thought this was a, a thing just for us.
It wasn't shattering my world or anything.
It was just, you know, one of those things, a little, a little brain worm that was sitting there just bugging me.
And so, yeah, I think it was later that night, you know, she looked over and she said, oh, isn't it amazing how many breweries we've been to?
And she was, and she motioned to the, you know, the stack of, of coasters.
And that's when I realized that they were all coasters that we, from breweries that we had been to together.
And I forget if she said this or if it just kind of occurred to me, but I think, you know, it was something that she had started doing only with the advent of our relationship.
It was not something that for all that time before that she had been doing all along.
And it all kind of crystallized for me, right?
Because, again, when I saw this stack, I just thought to myself, there's just too many of them.
Like, this is so many coasters.
There's no way we have been to this many different breweries.
Even though I know we've been to a lot of breweries, there was no way it had been this many.
And it turned out that we had, that the two of us had gone to this many breweries and collected this many different coasters from them.
And that was just a very eye-opening experience for me because here I am feeling kind of melancholy about believing that there was no way that we had shared this experience, you know, this many times together.
And it turns out that we absolutely did.
And so here I was in the back of my head thinking, oh, you know, it's just another example.
She's had so many more life experiences than I have.
And come to find out, it's not true.
These were things that I had done alongside with her the whole time.
So anyway, I tell this story to remind people, if you find yourself thinking things like, oh, someone else does more than I do or has done more than I do.
Or perhaps even, you know, maybe you're even diminishing your own experiences and not thinking about how, not just how many you've had, but maybe the importance of them.
Remember that other people may be thinking the same thing about your experiences.
It's just that you're so close to your own life story and your own experiences that sometimes you take parts of it for granted.
Here was an example of, again, something that I thought there was no way I could have even been involved in.
And it turned out that not only was I involved, I was the driving factor behind why this, why we had these.
I think this is an important reminder that we need to slow down sometimes.
And actively think about the things we have done throughout the course of our life.
Because odds are, there are things that you have done that maybe you have forgotten about.
Or maybe your brain has summarized them in terms of your memory where you don't think it was as eventful or impactful as it actually was.
Or maybe there, maybe you've accomplished things personally, professionally, that to you, you take for granted and you don't even think about anymore.
But in fact, they are rather monumental experiences that other people strive to have themselves on a regular basis.
So I say all this just as a friendly reminder to everyone that your life experiences do matter.
And you probably have a lot more of them and a lot more interesting ones than maybe you realize or think about on a daily basis.
And those are worth reflecting on and worth remembering and worth thinking about in an active way so that you don't forget your own life.
And so that you don't forget the things that you've accomplished, the things that you're proud of, the things that were interesting and motivating.
Because if we don't think about them regularly, it's easy for them to just slip into the background and just become almost a thing as if we never did it.
And I think that's a real shame in today's world to not take that time.
And remember who we are, what we've done, and why it matters.