Today's post is a message from the olds to the less olds. Both memes express messages that I definitely needed to hear as a younger person. The meme proclaims the following: "everything you have ever learned will come back to you." Now... I am not quite as optimistic that the things you have learned will precisely "serve you when need it." That feels a like Pollyanna to my mind.
But the critical point remains, that nothing you do in your life—if you are open to its return—is wasted. What follows is my own story. One of the thing it represents is that the size of the loop—i.e. how long it take to experience a thing returning—can be long.
In the early 2000s I was in a doctoral program at UBC. The details are not important to the story, but it ends with me leaving the program. It had been my dream to be a working academic, but I didn't have the wherewithal to complete the program. And for 15 years that followed, it felt like I had wasted years of my life on an academic pursuit that would never come to pass. It felt like I had flushed money and years of my life—of my very existence—into a pursuit that would never amount to anything. All that time focused on what seemed to me in those 15 years like esoteric philosophical and sociological bullshit.
But in my late 40s, I started down this therapeutic path that has landed me in the seat I am in as I write this post today. And all that philosophical and sociological bullshit that I had scorned for all those years... was exactly what I needed to be the therapist I am today. One of the things that I learned is that perspective makes all the difference. Or, to put it other language, I learned that when I was focused on the proper quantum of analysis, all the "bullshit" I had spent all that time on came alive to me. When I was doing my doctoral work, my quantum of analysis was institutions or communities or historical epochs. Honestly... I tried but I simply cannot make sense of such collections of people. But when the quantum of analysis was a person or couple or family... I could get my head around the problem, and I could offer something useful to the client. What I found out is that perspective is everything, and the lens or perspective that you throw away in one domain might be applicable and useful in another.
I know Memes of the Week are largely meant to light and fun, but @louisethebaker really gets me with her last line: "No love, however brief, is wasted." This is just beautiful in its simplicity. And, I think, we must take a maximalist view on love: love here means something more than familial or romantic love. Love here means something like attention and effort directed towards a person or an object or a process. Love here means a good faith effort to work at something or to play at something with your whole heart. And I say this as someone who has allowed himself to be open to things returning—she is correct: No love, however brief, is wasted.
The perfectly named "Geezer's Paradox" is just simply true. Again... this is a message sent from olds to youngs: you can't try to be cool. It is a logical impossibility. Trying is—in it's very nature—not cool. Trying is warm. Trying to effect a certain type of presentation to the world takes resources, and it's awfully sweaty work. The only thing that is actually "cool" in a metabolic sense is to do less, or to do whatever feels appropriate for the person you are. To be cool is to be metabolically efficient, and one thing I remember about being a younger person is that I put a lot more effort into how I presented myself and lot more effort into thinking about what people thought about me.
