Meeting the Self

Meeting the Self

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Long day.  4,000+ words in the bank and I feel like I'm moving forward again.

I want to ask a general question of the readership as regards progress.  It's a question I've been asking myself off and on since yesterday.  It goes like this.

Imagine that, for whatever reason, the person that was you 30 years ago could be brought forward in time just long enough for you to show him a one-day tour of your life.  If you're too young for this to work, feel free to shorten the time; if 30 years seems too recent, lengthen it.  Try to imagine a 'you' that was conscious of his or her world but who existed before any of the stuff you have, or the things you've done, came about.

How would that go?

I'm living in some tough circumstances right now - but considering the circumstances the 22-year-old me lived in, and his general communistic approach to life [art before all], I'm fairly sure he'd get over the shock that I was still treading water within the first few hours.  I know what he would have appreciated.

I would have done for him what I do for everyone: show him the world.  Show him the blog, show him the wiki, show him the books . . . but before I could do any of that, I'd have to wrestle him away from the internet.  Those would be a good five or six hours of me showing him what was happening, what the world had become, the shocks, the surprises, the changes that he couldn't predict.  We'd laugh over most of it; we'd get into a fight here and there about realism versus wants, like any tired old man explaining life to an angry young man . . . but I've been him once and I know how I'd calm him.  I'd lie.  I've only got one day.  I don't have time to explain fully how I've come to think as I do now.

We'd stop and have dinner.  I didn't know how to cook when I was 22 so I'd pull all the stops out for him, let him enjoy some of that.  We'd talk politics after that for an hour . . . and then I'd bring around the subject to the book I'm writing now and we'd talk about that, in depth.  He'd want to talk about the book he's writing . . . but that would just lead to me explaining reasons why his book didn't work.  Mostly, because he has a lot of reading to do.

Some might wonder why we wouldn't go anywhere.  Truth is, we'd go everywhere - far more places on the internet than we could see riding around this very middle class, very dull city I live in.  The bars look the same, though some old ones have closed.  The music isn't all that different. The streets haven't changed.  The mountains west of the city are the same mountains.  He's seen those things.  All the interesting stuff is right here on this computer.  In fact, the computer itself would set him on fire.

How would you manage it?



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August 2, 2016 at 12:51AM