Jim Corder, one of the professors in my PhD program at TCU, once said that texts can be archival. That is, the texts we make — texts of all kinds, verbal, visual, musical, etc. — if they are done well and done with honesty, can capture who and what we are at a given point in time and render that person back to us at a later date.
I've recently had the bittersweet experience of meeting 20-year-old me in this way. My old friend and coworker Larry Shapiro and I recently got reconnected via Facebook, and he said "I think I have a letter you wrote to me back when I went off to college." And I said, "I have *got* to see that letter!" So he fished it out of storage, photographed each wrinkled page, and texted it to me.
Here's what I learned about myself as a college sophomore, about the person I archived in my letter to Larry:
1) I knew nothing about women -- I mean literally nothing. I want to apologize to every woman unlucky enough to have crossed paths with me at that age.
2) The community of friends that I gained through my first job at the Sizzler Steakhouse in Wantagh was incredibly important in my personal and social development. I can see now that it was the first community I consciously chose to join outside of those provided by my schooling. The Sizzler is where I first met and befriended people who came from other towns -- not far away, but far enough to be different in important ways. In like manner, the Sizzler is where I first met and befriended adults -- people who were not much older than me, but old enough to be different in *very* important ways (they had husbands and wives and kids and mortgages, for instance). And long before I heard the words compassion, empathy, diversity, and inclusion, Paul Casey (the coolest person I had ever met – have ever met) showed me what those words meant by inviting Larry and me (and we were/are decidedly *not* cool) to parties, to pick-up softball games, to just hang out. I remain astonished by how easily Casey offered this life-altering generosity, by how beautifully counter it was to everything I had experienced in adolescent socializing up to that point.
3) I was already aware that -- contrary to all the hype -- college could be a horrible grind, a dreadfully constraining experience. In the letter, I asked Larry,“Is college life treating you well? Do you like it? It’s definitely the time to explore, to check out the infinite possibilities of what you can be, of what other people are like, what you like or don’t, or just how many ways there are to have fun.”
Almost 40 years later, I find myself giving the exact same advice to students. Twenty years ago, I saw burnt out and pissed off PhD students. It was pretty much expected, of course, but then I started seeing burnt out and pissed off Master's students, then seniors, then juniors, then sophomores, and now I am dealing with students who are burnt out and pissed off halfway through their very first semester. It's heartbreaking. They bought the lies we fed them; they have been busting their asses collecting every accolade and prize they could find since they were four years old; they have achieved and excelled in every possible way; and now they see how empty and pointless it all has been, but they don't know what to do about that. Changing majors seems like quitting, like failure somehow. We have never taught them how to be brave or how to put something down. So they put the blinders on and double down on career paths they don't really want but feel ashamed somehow to give up. They will or won't have midlife crises as a result, and I am not sure which of these is sadder.
4) I was already aware of the problems caused by over-thinking. As I advised Larry in the letter, “You gotta keep both feet firmly planted in reality or you are gonna get lost. I was so busy being intellectual and metaphysical that a lot of things slipped passed, a lot of things I would I’d really like to have back but will never have the chance to (like my ex-girlfriend, for example). So to my fellow philosopher, let this be fair warning: thinking is important, but DOING is what’s real.” Unspoken here is my early recognition that smoking pot made me not want to do anything other than smoke more pot (and I smoked a LOT of pot back then), that pipe dreams were much more attractive than doing the actual work necessary to become *anything*.
The painful realization here is how little I followed this advice myself until only very recently. For instance, I didn't do any significant international travel until I was in my late 40s. I didn't play in any real bands until I was in my late 40s either. And I didn't commit to doing the work to focus on, create, and play my own original music until I launched this blog two months ago.
A wise person in recovery once told me that I was never going to think or feel my way out of my current unhappiness, whatever that was -- that I was going to have to *do* something -- do something *different* from what I had been doing. This website and blog are efforts in that direction.