Looking Back
Lots of email comes to my inbox, dozens of items a day, hundreds a week. I don't open them all, much less read them all, but now and then something catches my eye and, opening and reading it, I find something that has special value for me. SomeTimes Fr Richard's column does it. Sean of the South. Writers for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Conversation and others, Big Think, EarthSky News and more. Some of the writing is serious, some less so, some takes less thought than others, some nail me.
One I often enjoy is MINIPhilosophy, which arrives on some frequency, IDK what. Today's edition is especially catching for me, an ancient human in extreme old age who someTimes looks back. Like with Jonny Thomson in today's article, there are boys I remember from Cove School days, some I've googled and found, these days usually an obit. When I found a classmate's obituary I always told Robert, an almost lifelong friend, who some years ago chased down nearly everyone in our class of 1949 and gathered an alumni group.
There was one boy, a military brat who was with us just one year, I mentioned him in a blogpost years ago but've never remembered his name. Judging by where a group of us were on the school grounds at the Time of a conversation I recalled - - under the scrub oaks over on Linda Avenue by where the bike rack was later, northwest part of the campus, it had to have been fourth or fifth grade. I've thought about him. In fact, he comes to mind nearly every Hurricane Season because at the Time of that conversation a hurricane was in the Gulf and threatening Panama City. I don't remember whether it hit us or not. What I do remember is the boy, in a group of us boys, telling us how much he hated living here, hated this place and hoped the hurricane would blow this town away. I was so taken aback that I never went near him again, and now, eighty-some years on, he's a phantom memory who almost never was. I can't even visualize his face. If I could visit with him now I might ask him how his life went, and if he remembers why he was so angry about the military sending his father to Tyndall Field, and whey he hated living in this place that is so sacred to me. He may have been excruciatingly lonely.
Some military brats seem to thrive on the unsettled, shifting life of new places and meeting new friends, our son certainly Joe seemed to. Others are quiet and shy, miserably unhappy with uprooting and moving into a mess of strangers every so often, our daughter Malinda was that way, and looking back, I don't think we were helpful to her in that twenty-year struggle. Looking Back doesn't always have me appreciating myself as parent, father, husband, son, grandson, cousin, friend, human, Earthling. The regrets can become an obsession that eats at me, and I have to force my attention away. The "forgiving myself for not being perfect" doesn't work for me when I realize that I didn't do my best and most loving for someone I loved or love so dearly. I need a poem to help me with it, as Frost's "The Road Not Taken" helps me when I find myself regretting choices I made over the past ninety years: contemplating Frost, I realize that if I'd taken any other roads in my life of coming upon countless roads diverging in my yellow wood, I'd not be here this evening, and I wouldn't trade this for anything.
How now, then, to find peace wandering among a junkyard of things that cannot be undone, words that cannot be unspoken? Undoubtedly some poet or psalmist has said it.
At any event, here (scroll down) is today's article that I like.
RSF&PTL
T90
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Hello everybody,
This week we’re looking at experiencing the world with older eyes.
There is a boy from school I think about a lot.
We’ll call him Henry, but that wasn’t his name.
Henry was a quiet boy and seemed to have few friends. In the rainy, wintery months, he’d spend his time reading. On clear, lovely days he would walk around the school grounds. He’d stroll along various paths, pausing often to look down at a plant or up at the sky, then he’d potter on. Henry was a boy from another age — another world — out on a saunter in his private, walled-off garden.
At school, I was the kind of chatty, always-joking boy who feared silence. A silence meant boredom. It meant failure. And so, Henry and I never really became friends. The talker and the walker; the busy and the still. In the complicated and hormonal melange of our foundational years, we are rarely given room to explore the vastness of another’s identity. We’re too busy finding our own.
I have few regrets in my life, but Henry is one of them. As you might imagine, there is no trace of Henry on social media. I’ve tried searching — I try almost every year — but Henry is a digital sasquatch. Someone had heard a rumor that Henry was now selling handmade guitars from a cottage in a wood just outside Canterbury. But that was seven years ago and you can saunter a long way in seven years when you’re a sasquatch.
I regret not talking to Henry. I think there was a depth to him, a richness of soul, that I needed then and I probably need now. As Walt Whitman told us, we each contain multitudes. Our personalities are complex, and there aren’t enough archetypes in the deck to truly get to the heart of them all. Back at school, there was a part of me that yearned for Henry. There is a version of my life where we became best friends and where I’m whittling a fretboard instead of typing a newsletter.
I was who I was then, and I am who I am now. But this week, we look at revisiting the old world with new eyes.
Go well,
Jonny
The many textures of the world
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We all change. Only gods and fools do not. We change to adapt to our environment, we change to avoid error, we change because we just want to. But there is change and there is change. For example, I recently got a haircut, and I feel like a changed man.
“Did you get your ears lowered then?”
“Had a fight with a lawn mower, did you?”
Etc., etc.
A haircut is what we might call a superficial change. Often, these types of changes are temporary and reversible, but they might also be something that’s pretty small in itself. You’ve started a new book, you’ve moved the wardrobe to the other side of the room, you’ve upgraded your iPhone. With superficial changes, life goes on as it did before — but with more comments about your hair.
Meaningful changes are those that change your identity. For some people, this may start with a new haircut but often needs more than just that. It could be a new house, a new car, a new job — the elements that make up a new person. For most people, meaningful changes are the gradual step, step, step of a thousand chosen paths. After I left secondary school, I chose to study philosophy at university. I chose to get outside more and enjoy long walks or runs. I chose to turn down big, busy parties for small gatherings and solitude. A thousand paths led me to now, standing on a path that walks remarkably close to Henry’s.
When we change, the world changes with us. I don’t mean this in the purely philosophical sense. Heraclitus was famous for saying that “all is flux” — you cannot stand in the same river twice because neither you nor the river is the same. To be honest, given the state of things in the UK right now, the river may very well just be a claggy bed. No, I mean in the phenomenological sense. When we change, we see the world differently.
Growing up, I used to love David Gemmell’s fantasy books. I’d whittle away entire holidays binging the Drenai saga. Recently, I tried to reopen a Gemmell book and found it simplistic and predictable. The characters were monotonous, the plot black and white, the dialogue hammy. I still love fantasy, but I read differently now.
When I talk with someone, I focus on topics I used to shy away from. I’m far more comfortable with silences and the thoughts that they bring. When I was at school, I would have walked past Henry a hundred times. These days, I’d pause to ask him what’s on his mind.
The joy of growing up — and I’m coming to learn it really is a joy — is getting to know the many textures of experience. The school years bring experiences your 20s do not. My 30s have opened up worlds that seemed distant or impossible when I was climbing trees as a nipper. The love I have for my friends, my family, my wife, and my children has revealed flavors that were never there, or never really enjoyed. I pine for the good old days and wallow in pointless nostalgia as much as anyone, but I’m excited about how growing up offers me things I’ve never before known.
The world is full of boring, ugly, forgettable things. But that almost always speaks more of us than it does of the thing. So, look again at those lost things from your past. Talk to the Henry you once found a bit strange, read the book you once found hard, listen to that song you could never understand. You’re wiser, older, and different. So experience the world with wiser, older, and different eyes.