Our Future Selves

I was folding shirts with my coworkers and one of them jokingly said something about being able to meet anyone living or dead and who would you choose.  Most people say relatives who have died or someone famous, living or dead, like John Lennon.  I used to say Buddha.  But it was only a joking question and not serious.  But I thought and said I would like to meet me from the future the day before I died to see what advice future me would give me (hahahaha it's like Jason Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, right?  From the movie or like Terminator.  Or like The Time Traveler's Wife parts, too).  Besides the obvious and shallow, like future me should have come back and told me my first summer after college that I shouldn't dye my hair red because yea that was bad, I wonder what future me would tell me?  What would we tell our old selves if we had the chance to go back and see ourselves ten years ago?  If we had the wisdom we have now, if we had it then, ten or fifteen or however many years ago, what could we tell ourselves? 

Can we even try to imagine our future selves and what they would say to us?  Can we attempt to appropriate future versions of who we are or our own possible sagacity? 

Part of this thinking comes from meeting so many new people, lots of whom are younger.  I can see a lot of uncertainty and lack of confidence and also a want to be accepted from them.  As you get older and more comfortable, it's no longer quite so important that you get people to like you as weeding out and discerning the people you like for what they actually are.  But when we're younger, generally we're more open and malleable in our personalities, not out of any sense of legerdemain or intentional manipulation, but out of a general desire to be liked.  But once we have met many people or have become more solid in who we are, what we like, what we can deal with in others, etc, it's not so important that people like us.  The desire fades and we just become our natural selves.  Which is probably why I like young kids and old people so much: neither group tends to care whether or not their personalities are pleasing to you.  They are just who they are and if you like them for that then great and if not, well it doesn't matter to them pretty much.

I think people also become this sort of template where you have personality types.  You can meet people and hang out with them for a bit and already discern who is the worrier, the leader, the jokester, etc.  Not that this oversimplified generalities are the essence of people because they're not.  These are the superficial faces we show and categories we fit into because they are so comfortable for us and convenient in their social proscriptions.  Who we are underneath these faces though, our complexities, our intricacies, our pasts that form our patterns today, those are really who we are and much more difficult to ascertain and, usually, if you get to those parts of other people, you can pretty much get along with anyone.  If you understand someone or you see their real lives and backgrounds, it almost becomes impossible to not find a commonality with them or to not feel an affinity or rapport with them.  Even if they act like terrible, you could dislike them for an action or what they do, but if you know about them and why they do it, it's hard to disregard them. 

I feel like that happens a lot, where you meet someone at work or through friends and you can't stand that person or they're just this huge and terrible person to you who does things that set you off or you just get angry at, but if given multiple times to meet that person or to learn about them, you begin to understand them and yes, you hate what they do, but it becomes hard to just dislike the person entirely.  Usually the people that are the meanest or do bad things are the people who dislike themselves the most and it's hard not to feel sympathy for a person who is struggling against themselves because that is a hard battle to see. 

But, I digress.  The faces we see, the roles we fall into, a lot of times we just see those from people and there are roles we don't generally prefer in others so we keep our distance from people who fall into those roles unless we need to be around them more for some reason.  So as we get older, those templates of behavior or personality allow us to easily navigate social situations and we can easily identify who we would, presumably, get along with best.  And these roles are derived and solidified with age.  When we're younger, we are not so confident or know ourselves so well (in general) but with time we become more confident and the solid in ourselves.  Hopefully, we become more wise.  Who I am now is the same as who I was ten years ago, but I (think and hope) am much wiser than I was before.  I can't change any of my past but it would be nice to be able to see the myriad playing outs of the different ways I could have made decisions and what would have happened from them.  And I wonder what old me would tell me now - I would think something heartening and maybe that it would all be all right, but it will all be right anyway, because it has to be and it must be and even though right now or yesterday or tomorrow, even if they are far from all right, still in a certain way they are ok because this is how it is supposed to be and changing it would make it all wrong and incongruous with that your now should be, so hypothetically and in my own mixed up logic, everything at every moment is all right because it's how it should be and thus how it is.