![]() I want you to remember how it felt to see your words in print for the first time, proof you exist. I want you to remember how light you felt when you rode Crow, that big chestnut horse you adored. I want you to remember a few things about this time in your life. But I hope you’ve done the same for yourself. I’m sure you’ve turned toward many humans, loved them, held them, and cared for them. I hope you gave your parents the stage and the time. I hope work didn’t consume you, even though you let your job get away from you in your thirties. ![]() I hope you transform your sorrow and longings into art. You are a quiet way of being, a force of storied tradition, loss, and joy. I imagine you don’t try and slow it down. I also read in Bittersweet that, as we get older, we find comfort with the passing of time. Lately, I’ve identified with the Arabic proverb, “Days of honey, days of onion.” You are the definition of bittersweet. You have a joyful curiosity about specific beauty points in the world. You have an acute awareness of passing time. You’ve always been a deeply melancholic person. We could remember that no matter how distasteful we might find someone’s opinions, no matter how radiant, or fierce, someone may appear, they have suffered, or they will.” I didn’t mean to jump right into suffering. “If we could honor sadness a little more, maybe we could see it-rather than enforced smiles and righteous outrage-as the bridge we need to connect with each other. ![]() I read this quote in Susan Cain’s book Bittersweet recently (you should read it again and see how you feel). The deep kind, the oceanic kind, the kind that is so dark and expansive, you wouldn’t be able to explain it to me. If you’re sixty, lucky enough to live until then, I know you’ve experienced pain by now. I want to scoop minutes up and feel like I can’t possibly carry all the hours to the end of my driveway. Right now, your thirty-something self is needy. I want to tell you all the things I want in my life. I’m struggling to imagine who you are.Ĭan I be honest? You’re you, after all. I guess this letter is sort of like inception. You’re as old as your mom was when you wrote this letter. In a way, that’s what the most honest writing does for us anyway. I want to ask questions and discover what scares me about getting older. But, I want to write a letter with more intention. We imagine the future in great depth, struggling to center on the present. We write through dreams and aspirations, ideals, and healing. When I think about it, we are always (sort of) writing to future versions of ourselves. I want to write a letter with more intention. But is it helpful? How can we best explore who we might become? How can we best break down the walls of the person we’re afraid to see? How do we write about the unknown? Sure, giving advice to our past selves is fun. When we write to selves about the past, we know them and there’s a pompous clarity in the writing. This person could have children, not have children, experience loss, grow old, find growth, experience unknown pain, and develop new habits. I want to dedicate time to that mystery soul. I want to explore how the future me might feel. The theme on Wit & Delight this month is “Show Up As Yourself.” So, I was intrigued to write about the possibility of change and speak to a portion of myself I don’t know. But why look back? What about our future selves? What questions do we want to ask? What do we wonder? You’re going to be so proud of yourself! I even wrote one in 2019, a tough love letter to my twenty-something self. You can’t go through life afraid to live it. Here’s what I would say to my post-pandemic self, they read. I’ve seen a lot of letters to past selves.
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