About an hour ago, I received a phone call from an old friend of mine,
whom I haven't seen in almost fifteen years. I knew him back in
Connecticut, and, well, things happen, life happens, and we lost touch.
We're getting together in a couple of hours for lunch.
This comes about for us all every now and then, this "getting back
together" thing, By its nature, this sort of social contact becomes a
point of recall; a time when everyone involved remembers the old days,
and talks about the intervening ones. A look back, in other words. I'm
not good at that. I make it a point not to be nostalgic. I never look
back, if I can help it, or, if I can't, I do my best to keep the "good
old days" in perspective, pairing them in my mind with the bad times
that invariably went along with them, but which we're prone to
forgetting.
Why do I do that? Why do I cut off my past like that? Well, first off,
I don't. What I try to do, though, is cut off the past from my
emotions. Did I have fun back then? Was I crying? Okay. That's
totally okay. But the emotions THEN don't reflect my emotions now, nor
the filter of my years that I must run them through. Lots of people
laugh when they recall the bad times, if they can see them with a
detached eye. I mean, distance from the situation can be liberating in
that regard -- even for me. But what is nostalgia if not a rewrite of
one's personal history? Or if those truly WERE the best days of your
life, what does it make all the years that followed? Second rate? Less
valuable? Less fun?
I don't know...I've always maintained that my best days are ahead of me
-- mostly because if I believed that they weren't, there'd be no reason
to go on. I'm certainly slower and fatter than in the old days. But
that only means that some of the things I valued then, some of the
activities and, yes, even people, well, I no longer do. See, since time
changes us all, a person's self-value must derive from those changes,
and not from the status of their past. This philosophy requires a
certain fluidity -- a certain willingness to re-invent yourself as time
imposes change on you. I'm slower and fatter now, so my value must come
from things other than thinness and celerity. Does that make my
important things NOW less important than my important things THEN?
Absolutely not, because if it did, that means I admit that my best days
are now years gone, and they are not. My greatest achievements in a
certain arena might be, but if I no longer participate in those things,
but instead, pursue others, what difference could it make? If I was the
lead in a series of stage plays once, and no longer am, what could it
matter? I'm not a stage actor any more. I don't measure my personal
worth by that yardstick any longer.
But visits like this one cause an unavoidable delving into the past, if
only to be polite. Certainly I won't dwell on it, no matter who
initiates the topic, but courtesy requires a give-and-take. At the very
least, we're having sushi, so, even if the conversation falters, the
meal will be fresh!
Saturday, June 25, 20211
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