Is the Future You Fearless?
Today’s post is about… time travel! Kind of.
You may have noticed that this blog can’t stop making references to Benjamin Zander. That’s because the he has a lot of good ideas. One of them is the title of our blog post on him, “Give an A”. He automatically gives each of his students an A in their first class of the year, and has them write a letter dated for next spring, addressed to the talented and confident musician they will hopefully have become. The idea is that Ben Zander is teaching, and grading, the person described in the letter.
Future correspondence is a neat idea in a classroom, because the teacher collects all the letters and then remembers to give them back to you. That way, you can forget about them, so the surprise is greater when they come back.
Now, thanks to super-duper technology, we who are no longer in school can use a computer for this purpose, thanks to a fascinating website located at http://www.futureme.org/. On FutureMe, you write an e-mail to your future self to be received however many weeks, months, or even decades later. The advantages over handwriting it are that you can’t lose the letter and you can’t peek at it. There’s no way you’ll see it again until the date you specified.
FutureMe has provided the option to mark your letter as “public (but anonymous)”, and indeed there is a section of the site where you can read the 15% or so of letters marked this way. Many of them are fascinating and often sobering examinations of what people think of themselves and what people are truly fearing in their day-to-day lives.
Some of them shimmer with almost blind optimism – a guy congratulating himself on becoming a physician 5 years before he graduates medical school, or a lady expressing envy toward her fitter, sexier future self, or even a confused pre-op transsexual congratulating whatever-self-they-think-they-are on finally making the currently-unmade choice of a lifetime.
Some of them are frothing with remorse and malevolence, as if they don’t want their future selves to let anything go. Are you still fat and useless? Are you still a junkie? Let go of her, because she will never love you. Remember back in 2004, when you had no life? I hope you’re not failing all your classes anymore. (Seriously, some of them are the most macabre and bitter obloquies I’ve ever seen directed at human beings.)
Some of them are bemused by the whole concept. “So, uhhh, you’re me.” How unfortunate that it is so awkward to communicate with the one person they spend their every waking moment with!
The morphologies, undertones and overtones of these letters are too varied for me to go on about forever, so you should read them yourself. I’ll just say that some of these people need to follow Fear.less contributor Pema Chödrön’s advice and practice loving-kindness toward themselves. In some cases, these public displays of gutting vulnerability are not addressed to friends but to hated enemies. We see the sort of problems people really wish they could solve but maybe aren’t doing much to work on yet, hoping that in the next few years they’ll turn velleity into ambition.
I invite you to try using FutureMe, if only to one day remind yourself of your own power. Here’s what I pray happens:
1. You write your future self a candid e-mail going on about all the miserable scary swamp gas in your life. It doesn’t matter what tone you take, whether you assume all the problems will be solved by the time you get it or whatever.
2. You set the date, and live life as that date draws nearer. Growing, learning, changing, fighting.
3. You receive the letter and it turns out that you’ be capable of laughing it off if it weren’t so interesting. Because that day you face a different set of fears, and the ones that seemed so crushing and ever-present before have been defeated, changed, invalidated, or their conquests of you were inconsequential and subverted. Wouldn’t it be great to be a novelist by the time you realized how much you worried about getting published? Wouldn’t it be great to be happily in love by the time you realized how much you were letting one stupid buffoon ruin your life? Wouldn’t it be great to giggle at the silly things younger you worried about?
Fears only get bigger and bigger as life goes on. What if that e-mail ends up lifting you up from the bottom of a whirlpool different from the one you were drowning in years ago? Can we be compassionate and gentle and intimate enough with ourselves to be our own cheerleaders? I hope so.
Short of all that, it’s still a very cool website and you should check it out.