Future self

Reverb 10 Prompt (from Jenny Blake): Imagine yourself five years from now. What advice would you give your current self for the year ahead? (Bonus: Write a note to yourself 10 years ago. What would you tell your younger self?)

Everybody loves to check the mailbox this time of year. Okay, here it is, the letter I’ve been expecting from my future self, which I need so that I can write this post. Tearing it open… and voila! Nothing. A blank page. Cute. Like that book of wisdom with just a mirror inside. Nice. On the bright side, now I know what to send my ten-years-ago self. Convenient. Just like all those email gift cards I sent out to my family for Christmas. Simple. Just what I wanted, today, yesterday, and tomorrow. Seriously.

A lot can happen in five years. A lot will happen. What it if I could know, for sure, how the really important things in my life are going to play out? What if, for instance, my 2015 self told me that despite seven-and-a-half years of repeatedly turning my life upside down in support of my wife’s career goals, our marriage will crash and burn just as soon as she settles in to her dream job? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fear this on some level, that I didn’t worry that the strain of these years might prove too much for our bond to bear, and in the end she’ll have the job, the job will have her, and I’ll be left alone, again. If I knew for certain that this would be my fate, would I bail right now? Would I withdraw the support my wife has come to rely on just when she needs it most, as she limps toward the finish line? No, I don’t think I would. I think I’d hang on until the bitter end, even if I saw it coming five years ahead of time.

I’ve already learned the lesson that there are no guarantees when it comes to relationships. I remember well the awful feeling when my most recent ex sat me down for “the talk.” This after I had given her every bit of my heart for five years, after I had followed her 2000 miles across the country (leaving my beloved Bay Area) so that we could stay together. She said something to the effect that “I wouldn’t be who I am today without your love. You were the one who gave me these wings, but now I have to fly away.” And so she did. Right into another man’s arms. I definitely didn’t see that one coming, but what if I had? What if my future self had dropped in on me five years prior, on that first day that I laid eyes on her in my Theories of Counseling class? Could I have been persuaded to resist her charms? Would I have been discouraged from boarding that train if Future Bob showed me all the unedited video footage of the wreckage I’d be tangled up in when things would eventually go off the rails? Nah. All aboard!

So fuck it, I don’t want a letter from my future self. Not even a few simple words of encouragement. I don’t want to know anything in advance, however much I pretend otherwise at times. My Dad probably won’t be around in 2015, if the doctors are right. I don’t want to know. I might not be around in 2015. I don’t want even that assurance.

Don’t get me wrong. I hope everything will turn out okay — with my Dad, with my marriage, with my life. But who needs hope if you already know everything will turn out fine? All that drives me to love, to cherish, to attend to with care, to “head the gong” — it all comes from a place of profound unknowing, inherent uncertainty, and incomprehensible mystery. I like the sense of possibility that comes from hoping without knowing for sure. I like surprises. Like yesterday, when I actually did make an important trip to the mailbox.

I was walking to work and decided to cut through a quiet, residential block as I approached the edge of campus. An elderly woman saw me passing by from across the street and in a flash she stepped off her porch and made a bee-line for me. She was wearing slippers and a nightgown, inside of which she tucked her arms tight against her body. It was a bitterly cold morning. Before I could quite register her presence, she was standing right in front of me, flashing me the sweetest little-old-lady smile. In an eastern-European accent she said, “I have a letter in my front pocket. Would you please put it in the mailbox for me?” “Of course! I’d be happy to!” I said, returning a big smile while at the same time realizing that she did not, as I had supposed, have her arms wrapped around herself to keep warm. She had no arms at all. Something in the way she smiled prevented me from registering anything but the gleam in her eyes, and so I reached into her pocket, grabbed the letter, and headed toward the mailbox as if the two of us had been meeting like this every Monday morning for a hundred years. She thanked me as she quickly ran back across the street and into her house, never once looking back to check whether or not I actually mailed the letter.

Her smile, her trust, the gleam in her eyes — I’m at a complete loss to explain why these things mean the world to me, but they do.