We put a lot of value on firsts. A child's first birthday. Our first love. Our first broken bone. The first job we get. The first time we lose a job. As we go through life it seems like our chances at firsts go down. That's not to say we're missing out on new experiences. Life is a constantly changing series of experiences, each of which is unique because we're different when they happen. So even the same event done a second or third time could almost be thought of as the first time because up until that moment it couldn't have taken place in that exact way until it did. The first time something happens to us it tends to leave a permanent impression on us though. In some cases the first becomes the standard in which others are judged. That can be both a gift and a curse since it's not always fair to compare what has happened with what could happen. Like with many first time sexual experiences they can be awkward, painful, and ultimately a poor indicator of how future experiences will be.
Many of us may still remember our first love. The ones between the first love and today's could be a jumbled mess of memories, but that first one will always be with us in some way. I think a good part of that is because our body and mind hadn't been exposed to that emotion up until that point. Never having experienced something like that before only makes it that much more intense. Combined with the fact that when we're young everything is already more intense. As with many things in life, that level of intensity can't be sustained for very long. Eventually it fades to more manageable levels and we'd like to think that with age and experience we're better suited to handle it as we get older. Try spending some time with someone who's just gotten into a relationship. If you're lucky you may get to talk to them in about six months when things cool down from be white hot to just smoldering. In a way that so-called honeymoon period is a chance to try and recapture that intensity we first felt years ago. As I mentioned, it's just not something that can be maintained and when it passes that's when we can start to see the other person with unclouded eyes. One could argue that's when the relationship really begins.
I've talked about the different kinds of friends we have in our lives. As children our standard for allowing someone to be our friend is much looser than it is when we're adults. Sure we may know a lot of people. We may have a ton of online "friends" who we know through various aspects of our lives, but how many people in your life are actual friends? I've moved around a lot in my life and I have different friends from different places in my life. As I've gotten older some of those friends are so engrained in my life that I can't really remember a time without them. Still there was a time for all of us when the people we call friend today were nothing more than strangers. I've come up with a name for a category of friend that many of us may not even think about. I call them The First People. When you move to a new town or start a new job you often don't know anyone there. The First People are the first ones that come into our lives. In a way we lower our defenses slightly to allow for new people. Think about it, when you're firmly established in a town or job how many new people do you let into your life? You may already have a group of friends so the desire to add someone else may be minimal at best. When we're alone in a new situation it's natural to look for someone to be a companion, even if that means accepting someone we may have overlooked had we been somewhere within our comfort zone. That's not meant to say that these First People are substandard in anyway. In fact it's just the opposite. These people are in our lives almost out of necessity. Because we need them we may be exposed to a different type of person than we're used to. This can be a good thing, especially since the older we get the fewer chances we may get at experiencing something new. These First People are somewhat unique because while they're late comers to our lives, they're also the first ones to be established within whatever new venture we're on.
As I mentioned at the beginning, we put great value on the first time something happens. Anniversaries are really just a yearly celebration of something's first time. It's entirely possible that many of our first experiences are when we get hardwired a certain way. So when we're young and it seems like there are firsts around every corner, we're essentially being shaped into the person we're going to become based on how those firsts turn out. If our first job is terrible then we may be inclined to think that work in general aren't going to be much fun. While it's possible for new experiences to come along and reshape our perception of how something could be, will we always be influenced by what came first? If that's the case should we strive to make each first the best or the worst so that anything that comes afterwards has a chance of living up to what came before it?
