The good old days of tomorrow
Again? Another post about age and time travel?
Yes, I guess so. We already established that I'm a “Doctor Who level nerd”, as you called it. But that's beside the point.
Self-talk and storytelling are mostly about a point of view, about passively or actively taking a point of view.
It can be (but often isn't) obvious, it can be yelled into your face until you see it, and sometimes the penny just drops. This is such a story about a penny.
Me and a very good friend were chatting about on the phone. And I suddenly (well, in context of course) got asked “Would you want to be young again?”
We circled around the question for a while, weighing boundary conditions (Young as in our younger selves? Or rather our current selves in our younger bodies? Knowing everything at school but lacking our current income? ...), stayed a bit at “No matter the rest but definitely give me back my former resistance to alcohol”, until we tried to condense it further into “What is it then exactly that you miss?”
It was then that the penny dropped.
With certainty I said “Based on that question, wouldn't it be the way more logical exercise to imagine ourselves in 20 years, considering what your 20-years-older selves would miss from today... and savour as much as we can today?”
Who we are will one day perish.
What we have will get lost.
Most names forgotten.
This is sad – from a point of view – but nothing productive is born from this sadness, is it?
But if the outcome is the same, then my point of view becomes a choice. My choice.
We agreed and promised to soon meet and catch up. In this present, the good old days of tomorrow.
As my German friends sometimes say as a drinking toast:
“We will never again meet that young!”
Next post: “Now fly my little facts, fly”
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