We Don't Remember Everything...
...exactly like it was.
I sometimes find myself in loud, busy places where I don’t know anyone and no one knows me. To be honest, I’ve come to enjoy the sensation: It’s similar to being a tropical fish in an aquarium over in the corner. I can observe and listen, and no one around me is the wiser. Our mutual actual histories and full lives stand obscured from each other, often behind public-facing lap-top / earphones/ dark glasses facades contrived to reveal nothing of what lies behind them. We’re safe that way, each in our own world and yet in the frantic presence of others.
They could well do the same to me of course, but at a certain age you surrender the presumption of being interesting, or in any meaningful sense worthy of curiosity. There are certain places that I go to in Lexington for precisely that reason (I’m in one right now). I have long prided myself on being an expert in planned anonymity (I’ve sometimes thought I could teach lessons about that to the CIA 😉).
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I’ve had it both ways in my time: Even today, I still go to places where I have casual acquaintances and a few genuine friends. I still attend occasional gatherings in my home town that I really enjoy. For reasons I can’t entirely explain even to myself, I find myself drawing-back slightly from these responsibilities and these relationships. I know it’s not a healthy behavior, but it’s a repetition of a life-long cycle of coming and going…of trying it out, and falling back. As you age, many things around you naturally pull away or drop by the wayside. Sometimes, you do the pulling.
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As some of you know already, I grew-up and spent much of my life in a typical small town where everyone knew who you were and visa-versa. Not just who you were, but your parents and your extended family. It was widely known where you went to school and when, and who your ‘crowd’ was if you had one. If there were any family scandals, they would follow you and your posterity to the day of judgment (My wife relocated there from a large city after we met in college. She was well-liked and highly functional, but I’m not sure she ever entirely adapted to that entangling lack of privacy).
Same for where you lived in town and just about every other external fact of your existence. It was rare to enter any public space where your first instinct wasn’t to scan the premises to see who you knew in there. Often as not, you did know somebody and you could stand and catch-up for a while. I wasn’t very good at small talk even then, but I struggled gamely (if not very successfully) to master it (It’s a southern small-town dialect as subtle and as distinctive as Mandarin). It took me a while to quiet that initial scanning reflex after moving here.
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I don’t mean in any sense to give an impression of belittling this. There was a comfort to it. Your community could wrap itself around you like a warm winter coat on a cold night. At even the worst moments (and there were a few), you were never allowed to surrender entirely to despair. You inherited a timeless agriculturally-based conviction of fundamental long-term optimism: Time moves on and tomorrow would somehow be better. Or the day after that. And usually, it was. I’ve missed that childlike sense of uncomprehending faith and taken-for-granted security for many years…
…but it comes at a price. Even at its most well-meaning, that enforced closeness can become smothering. At some point, it inevitably becomes a setting of standards. You must operate within certain parameters if you’re to ‘belong’. But that universal human urge to belong can slowly but surely dilute your individual humanity if you aren’t very careful. It takes more strength of character than most people possess to resist the silent authority of acceptable orthodoxy…
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… and when you finally do, you will face other difficult choices. Turns out, freedom really isn’t free 😉. You’ll think at times that you’ve sacrificed security and comfort for something vulnerable and risky, but that’s an illusion and a nostalgic trick of the memory. Everything is risky and it always was. We relentlessly erase the full substance of the past while maintaining its idealized form in our hearts. What you thought you were leaving behind lives only in your imagination. It’s a wonderful memory and it can carry powerful lessons, but it’s only that. It's where we are now that matters.
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I can’t precisely attribute this quote. It’s an amalgam from various people:
“We become the future by walking into it.”