It’s human nature, but if you value what you have now, what you’ve seen, done, and hopefully learned, why would you want to go back to a point where you had none of it or at least less of it?
Aging is a funny thing to say the least. I suspect almost all of us look back on our youth and at least occasionally wish to recapture a part of the past, if only the feeling of being alive like you were at eighteen, when most experiences were new and the world was waiting to be discovered. The young are gifted with both endless vigor and a marvelous naivete that everything will always be like this, as though life were an endless series of adventures, each one unique and magical, a never ending series of firsts. We look at those older than us, not necessarily by much, and wonder how it is they’ve become jaded mentally as well as physically. The physical aging process we might not be able to fully understand, as in what it feels like to be in a body past its prime with the growing aches, pains, and other maladies of age, but we can see it all around us, making it obvious that a 70 year old cannot perform like an 18 year old. I’m always reminded of David Lynch’s brilliant, The Straight Story when a young man asks an old man the worst part of getting old in the first place. He replies, remembering when you were young. The mental aging process is far more subtle and unfathomable, however, manifesting as a sense that those older than us are diminished somehow, either too tired for life, too bored with it, too cautious for their own good, too focused on the future rather than the present, or conversely, that something just goes missing as one gets older, a zest for life, a desire to experience new things, the simple joy at being alive, all gone with the years. Many young people look at their parents, uncles, aunts, their friends’ parents, and other older people, only to insist that this will never happen to me. I won’t let it, under any circumstances. I and I alone will remain fundamentally young at heart, only to find themselves twenty years later with two kids of their own and the cycle repeating itself as their children say the same things they once said about their own parents. Personally, I’ve claimed that if I had a choice, I’d relive the first day of senior year in high school through the first day of freshman year in college on repeat for the rest of my life, and there is some truth to the assertion. It was an amazing year to say the least, one that locked in life-long friendships, ended relationships and started others, the literal and figurative closing of one chapter and the starting of another, punctuated by the freedom of being an adult for the first time and the immature adventures that entailed for Generation X. I had a car of my own and could go where I wanted. I had places to go, parties, vacations, and more, essentially reliving the dreams I had as a kid watching a 1980s comedy as best I could. As Shakespeare put it, the world was my oyster at the time, but as the old adage also has it, that was then and this is now. It’s altogether easy for me to make such a flippant statement when I know it’s impossible. I can’t go back to 1993, anymore than I could go back to the other amazing years in my life or any point in between, 2002 (made my first independent film), 2016 (got married and made another film), or 2023 (travelled some 25,000 miles around the world on my own version of a rockstar tour). I can’t even go back to a year that isn’t even finished yet, one that saw me travel to South America for the first time, come face to face with a sea lion in the Galapagos, saw Kenneth Branagh perform King Lear, and get personally invited to drive a Lamborghini that doesn’t get released publicly for six months, not that I’m counting or anything.
The past, for humans at least, exists only as a memory, sometimes shared with others, but even if it didn’t, would I or anyone else really want to go back? This is a much tougher question to answer. If we could dip temporarily into our younger selves to relive a moment, an evening, or even a few days, I think most of us would, but if we were trapped in our younger selves for an extended period, the question becomes a lot more complicated. Do we know what we know now or are we actually our younger selves, as naive as we were then, but if we don’t have any access to our experience in between, does the question have any meaning in the first place? I think it’s fair to assume that anyone musing about going back in time, implicitly believes they can carry something with them, to live something again as some combination of their younger selves and the person they are now. Perhaps, they want to be their older selves in a younger body, an idea that certainly has its appeal once middle age sets in, but even then, some issues appear at even the slightest scrutiny. The body, of course, is only experienced in the mind via the brain. We don’t feel anything in our muscles, appendages, organs, or anything else, save what is projected by our nerves into the brain via processes that remain unclear even after years of study. What we can say pretty safely, however, is that if you were to place my current brain in my eighteen year old body, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I would likely behave as I do right now, with the creeping cautiousness of middle age at points, though I’d just as likely feel much better after a night of drinking or a long day hiking or racing. Aging, rather fortunately considering the alternative, is a gradual process and – while we can certainly spot the differences between our physical capabilities at key points in our lives – our minds act only in the present. Consider an older dog. Instinctively, based on signals from the body, the aging canine steps more gingerly, takes more care jumping up or down from a bed or a couch, runs a little more slowly, the same as a human. When we talk about living in the body of our younger selves, we’re not talking about taking the entire mind with us or we would act like old people. We want to take only a part of it, but what part is that, really? While the answer varies from person to person, most are probably referring to some aspect of their experience, the knowledge they gained over the years and everything that comes with it, memories, perspective, judgement, dare I say, wisdom, but if that’s the case, why would anyone want to go back at all? Putting this another way, if we are implicitly operating under the assumption that we will bring back what we have gained in life since, why bother? If you value what you have now, what you’ve seen, done, and hopefully learned, why would you want to go back to a point where you had none of it or at least less of it?
Rationally, you probably wouldn’t, but emotionally there is obviously an appeal to turning back the clock in some fashion, even if the specific fashion can be difficult to explain. Humans are essentially restless creatures trapped by time. The past lives on in our memories, where we are prone to reminisce, sometimes with advantages as Shakespeare’s Henry V told his gathered troops at Agincourt, but we are bound entirely in the present before it unfolds into the future, entirely against our will. We can no more visit the past in any fashion outside our own wishful thinking than hold onto the present, and yet we simply can’t resist considering the possibilities over and over again, wondering what it would be like if we could step outside ourselves even if only in our minds. It’s natural, but somewhat misguided. Age, past a certain point in our lifespans, is inevitable decay until death, passing into the undiscovered country from which no traveler returns. The science fiction author Dan Simmons once described the arc of our lives as a spiral winding forward into time. When we are born, the circumference is vast, filled with almost unlimited possibility, but every moment life goes on, it shrinks as the roads not taken disappear from us and our possible futures are reduced. Right before death, it closes on a single point, where no possibilities are left. The distance in between is the measure of our lives, the relationships we’ve built, the careers we have chosen, the lives we have touched, the impacts we have made. Save for the most unfortunate among us, the span between our initial choices and possibilities when we were young and the ultimate end, is likely the most productive, when we have the greatest chance to define who we are, what we want, and what we will do, when some of our dreams will turn into realities, whether through our spouses and children, or our choices in where to invest our precious time and resources. As adults, we’re not naive enough to believe all our dreams come true as we imagined them as children. We’re not likely to become President, or fabulously rich and famous, but nor are we powerless to shift our possibilities to include some of the magic we’d hoped for and if you look around, chances are some of it is right there either in your grasp or easily within reach. For me personally, the part of me that would like to go back also wouldn’t want to give up the things I have now, far from it. Instead, there’s a small chance my younger self, obsessed with cars, always ready for an adventure, hoping marijuana would one day be legal, wanting someone to build a life with, would want to leap forward and if you really consider it, or at least I might hope that is the case. The same might be true of you.
The New Year itself might be arbitrary, a human convention of which the cosmos cares nothing. We insist that the Earth has completed another revolution around the sun, suggesting it’s in the same place as it was 365 days earlier, but the facade falls apart when you consider the solar system, the entire galaxy, the galaxy cluster, and the universe itself as moved on. It doesn’t feel that way because the rock we call home is traveling at a constant speed, a relatively safe haven in a cold, uncaring reality, but we’ve moved approximately 9.46 trillion kilometers since this time last year, roughly equivalent to a light year, traveling 230 kilometers per second every second of every day. From this perspective, we should take stock of the year that has passed, but do so in a way that considers how far we’ve all personally traveled, literally and figuratively. How do you measure a year as good or bad, and the possibilities for the next as positive or negative? There are, of course, things we can’t control, personally from the deaths of loved ones to horrible diseases, to broader changes in society, from the outcome of elections to global pandemics. Some of these Springsteen once described as “things that’ll knock you down you don’t even see coming, And send you crawling like a baby back home.” Sometimes, they will pile up and make you feel powerless, so weak you want to explode to quote the Boss again. If nothing else, life has away of teaching you lessons, of making you feel on top of the world one minute, crushed beneath it the next, but at least some of these vagaries of fate are beyond our control and we have no choice except to find away to cope, to forge our own happiness amidst the chaos and constant churning that afflicts human affairs. Coping, however, isn’t enough for anyone who seeks a little bit of happiness in this world. We want to do more than simply survive, believing deep down inside we were born for better things. Coping, however, offers a window, an empty emotional space, where you can put what’s most important to you as an individual, what do you really want out of life and why? The why is just as important as the what. We’re buffeted by unconscious desires the same as external forces, and we certainly cannot fulfill them all, even the luckiest among us will have their regrets and missed opportunities, somewhere right now there’s a billionaire thinking they should have done things differently. Why do you want something and why is it so important to you? This is a question I can’t answer, but there’s no better time than the turning of the year for you to consider it for yourself, only then will you be able to separate the good from the bad, seeking more of what is good, and hopefully, maybe just hopefully, learn that you are a bit luckier and doing a bit better than you think.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 