Whilst visiting my friend Bob last night, our conversation turned to an interesting notion: that in looking back upon our individual pasts, we find challenges and vexations which today seem almost simple and pedestrian. How did middle school become so complicated, or for that matter, the flip-turn? Why did negative numbers make me want to tear out my hair; cursive, to break my pencils into tooth-picks, and mile-racing to make my stomach want to leap straight from my mouth? What happened between then and now to make so many old difficulties laughably easy now?
In speaking with Bob on the subject, a single word came repeatedly to the fore: growth.
We grow over time in various ways, some perhaps to our benefit, and some certainly to our detriment, and which is which is not always clear. At times we grow a little more wise or fit, and sometimes a little more lazy or ignorant. Through some seasons we grow more kind and forbearing, and others more cruel and impatient. Through all ages we grow older, for better and for worse.
But the key word I think is growth. We have experiences, with which we interact, puzzle over, and make our own. We suffer loss and revel in triumph (or revel in loss and suffer in triumph); we meet new people, or old people who bring their own growth into our lives. We date and eat and sleep and fart and travel and breathe and think and read and do mean things and do nice things and make all manner of things.
And yet, we still have challenges today, much as our former selves had challenges in the past. We've become experts in the challenges of yesterday, but face a whole new batch today. In some ways perhaps we are as dazed and confused by the puzzles of today as our former selves were of earlier trials all those years ago. And a year from now - or five perhaps - we might look back on the present time and wonder how any of it vexed us at all.
It's hard to imagine, but it does seem to happen. Bob mentioned an article he once read in which people from a wide swath of the ages were asked to look back upon their past, and consider how much they'd changed over time. Be they 20 or 60 years of age, when questioned, it was found basically every ten years everyone queried completely revamped themselves. Values changed, priorities changed, political views changed; in short, a reasonably different person from ten years prior. Yet when asked whether they thought they would change so much in the next ten years, nearly everyone thought they'd remain basically the same.
They willingly acknowledged how much they'd changed in life heretofore, but could not imagine changing so much in the future.
It's no surprise then that we can hardly imagine ourselves as people who find today's demands so effortless, obvious, and paltry. We are perhaps as saplings to an oak tree, astonished at the height and breadth and acorn-count of that arboreal giant. Yet both were once seeds in the ground.
Given nourishment and time, saplings, oaks, and people grow and adapt to the world in which they are planted. It's not always easy growth (and perhaps never easy in the moment), but when times demand and we respond our branches grow a little more. And things once difficult now seem simple, and today's challenges yield tomorrow's fruit.
So it seems we are growing and becoming all the time. Today we are one thing, and tomorrow another. Through experience and experiences we change, in ways predicted and unforeseen. And though the present be full of difficulties, it is nice perhaps to look back sometimes and see how far you've come. Indeed, you've grown a lot, and will likely grow some more. And though hard to imagine, today's difficulties may well be tomorrow's routine, not to mention a source of humor for your future self. That we might laugh at the awkward and heavy-handed manner of our present selves is perhaps one way, as Montaigne once wrote, to, "...become wise at our own expense."
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