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.

Success & Failure

I read a line in an Isabelle Allende book about how success and failure were Western ideas or inventions, about how they don't really exist as per se.  I quit the other day and one of my bosses told my students (asking my permission first if it was okay) and then told them to implore me to stay.  One student (who I like a lot but don't generally think similarly to) told me I shouldn't quit because I move around too much and I should stick to one thing because it's a failure to quit.  She was basically equating quitting with failure.  This is the same student who also thinks I should get married and live probably a normal, "respectable" life.  It's difficult because a lot of people I know think like this.

I don't think in terms of success and failure anymore.  My greatest lessons, what I have learned the most from, have been the hardest things in my life, the struggles.  I hated almost every minute of being in Wulinguyen, China, mostly because I was so sick and that shaded so much of my experience there.  But it changed me forever and made me appreciate life in a whole different way.  My friendships and relationships, the most difficult parts especially, have made me evaluate myself and be more aware of whom I am and how that affects others.  I have learned so much from them.  Success and good times are great, I'm not saying they aren't, and I hope they always exist for me.  Of course I would prefer a life filled with more "successes" than "failures" but I find both terms problematic in that they create this ideas that the former is good and the latter is bad. 

I kind of view failure as never learning or as doing the same things over again and not changing yourself or not doing something different.  That's really the only way I ever see people as "failing."  I don't think quitting a job or moving or changing something is failing.  I think gaining new experiences and change are valuable.  I would much rather have a life filled with new, different experiences that challenged me than one where I had one or two or even three long term jobs.

This student also kind of thinks similarly with relationships, that I should get married and have kids, you know, the old settle down routine.  I'm not entirely against this but I'm not really for it either.  I think relationships, almost all of them, are valuable.  Sometimes they last and sometimes they don't.  I think it's good to have long term ones, but I don't equate one major long term one as success and the lack of that as failure.  Sometimes I want to want what everyone else wants, like I want to want to live the traditional life of marriage, family, and a stable singular job, but I really don't want it.  I used to be annoyed at myself sometimes for not wanting these things and most people don't understand why I don't want them.  I just accept it as it is at this point.  I don't want to have these things because I can't think of something better to do or because I'm too scared to live the life I want to have.  I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with marriage, children, and a single stable job and if they happen for me then they do but if they don't then right now I am perfectly satisfied with them not happening. 

I value experience and living out the ideas you want.  Quality time in a life of your own design filled with however you want to spend your time, whether it be working, in a hammock on a beach, reading, writing, with friends, family, or whatever you want...I think it is all valid.  I think if you can see what you want and you can go for it, whether you "succeed" or "fail" then that is valuable and that those two terms don't really exist.  But living a life chained to those two terms and letting them decide your feelings or your way of life is ridiculous.  Living a life conditioned by society and wanting things because you're told to want them as opposed to inherently wanting them, to me, is absurd or, probably more accurately, a lack of creative thought.  If you really want them though, the things society tells you to want, then that's great.  But if you're not sure what you want and you go after the things society tells you to want, then that might not end up fulfilling you.  I think you should figure out what fulfills you or search for it, and that search in and of itself is valuable.

Watches & How Not To Be Alone

I got a new Shark watch.  These things are awesome.  Yea, I know, no one has a watch because we all have cellphones, but I felt uber hypocritical telling my students no cellphones in class (which they don't listen to me about anyway...) and yet looking at my cellphone all the time to check the time.  Alas, I have a new watch.  I feel so 1990s.

Great article by a great author: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/how-not-to-be-alone.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0

Is technology taking us away from traditional social interaction?  This debate has gone on ad nauseam it seems (or maybe I've just slayed myself with redundancy by asking this question millions of times in my classes - oh hyperbole!).  Yes, of course technology keeps us "alone"  - it gives us a place to hide when needed, social interaction in a non-traditional way, mental stimulation, and (questionable) knowledge.  I was telling my students about the phone game whereby when you go to dinner with friends or family or random passers-by (hey it could happen) and everyone puts their cellphones in the middle of the table.  The first person to reach for his or her cellphone has to pay for everyone's dinner.  It's such a good idea (but I also thought my idea of "Carlo Rossi Sangri Hands" as a replacement for Edward Forty Hands was a good idea so maybe we shouldn't trust my judgment).  I think technology is just another way form of instant gratification (unless something is wrong with a device and then it becomes instant frustration).

That was my ramble and I'm sticking to it.