Partnering the past

Who are you that claim to have once been me?  I've seen your pictures: mop head kid in kilt, mop head twenty something with beard. You had a future which, for better or worse, turned out to be me, but it's not clear to me today who you were then. At each moment the answers were manifest, but looking back, I can't recover any of them.

These reflections follow viewing the 12 year time-lapse film Boyhood this weekend. We leave the main character Mason when he's 18 and just starting college. I was 18 once and went to college; were you, 18 year old Peter, like him--taciturn but taking things in? I seem to remember you more talkative, opinionated, filled with urgencies that you struggled hard to name.

I could with effort call more episodes to mind but I'd face the same problem: I only know you, my former self, by interpreted memory, filling in the gaps (many in my case) with inference. I've looked through some of the things you wrote around then and it seems at best callow, at worst silly. You were so naive, and working so hard to overcome that naivete. You might have been him in the movie--confident and insecure simultaneously.

You never had a worked-out plan for the future but rather an agenda for finding a certain way of being in the world. That same mission I recognize in myself now. Your flailings-about in that process seem, from this vantage, a bit laughable. That's certainly not an opinion you would have liked to hear from your future self. You would have wanted me, looking backward, to take you as seriously as you did looking forward.

Perhaps there's a future Peter who's set to get a chuckle out this blog. The discoveries that I make now that seem fresh and compelling will have been integrated and transcended by then. The future is likely to be as complacent about who I am today, as I am about who I was 18 or whenever. Okay, I had hair then, more than enough of it, and all kinds of energy and anticipation. Still I didn't know then what is obvious now, as I don't know now what will be obvious at 80.

I think, Peter then, or Peter now, you can't take too seriously what will come after. The successor is always in a good position to mock or deplore the predecessor, but so what? The point is that we are still on the trail of golden beast we've been tracking all our lives. If by 80 you're not, then the laugh is on the Peter of 2030.

I guess hospitality, friendship and exploration apply to my encounters with my former selves. There's enough distance for you, the college freshman  rambling around UVM to be an Other to me, the grandfather pottering around the garden in Rozzie, neither of us with any reason to look down our noses. We each have our place in time, used or being used more of less well. There were chances then as now for lastingness. Did I take them? Am I taking them?

It feels as though you, Peter then, had aspirations not fully realized in who I am now. Where then is that future you hoped for yoursself? Are some parts ahead of me? Are we together in seeking it? Okay, let's go.