No Thanks for the Currency

I was trying to construct a line - you know, a humorous one off, as I am wont to do. Sometimes the muse descends and gifts me a completed joke but other times, I have to tinker and revise so the balance and flow are crafted to elicit the exact kind of reaction I need (a laugh, a groan, a punch in the nethers). I was also inspired by a gift from my family, a book called Letting Go Is All We Have To Hold Onto. This book is a collection of witticisms, some approaching Zen Koan-like status in their paradoxical nature. Often, when I write a line, it, too, has that same self-contradictory, or at least self-aware approach.

So I had something like "the only things I can't remember are my memories" but I didn't like the use of both "remember" and "memories" so I switched to "the only thing I can't remember is what happened" but that also presented as "I remember everything as long as it isn't in the past." It is still a work in some sort of gress, though many will deny that progress is the apparent direction. But it did get me thinking, and that's always a bad thing.

It isn't that I'm against reunions. I have developed an aversion to them because of how they have been presented to me. Time was, you had an experience and you let a requisite and necessary amount of time pass before you revisited it. Reunions were on anniversary years like 25, or 10. And I can accept "5" even. But then my kids went to camp and came back, ready for school. Note -- the camp situation that my kids went through was markedly different from mine. They went to camps that were favored by many of their friends from school and from the neighborhood. They fit in because they were like everyone else. I rarely went to camp, and when I went, I knew no one, and it mostly stayed that way throughout the summer. I was an unhappy child and that contributes to my sparkling personality now. Hurray.

My elder asked me if I could, on some weekend in September, drive her to her "camp reunion." She was having a reunion with people whom she knew well and many of whom she still saw frequently, weeks after returning from camp. Not years, and not even months. Weeks. I was reminded of the practice on one of our school retreats: students go on a bus together on a Thursday. They do activities on a Friday, spend a sabbath together and then have a bonfire on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, they watch a video recapping the weekend. They relive memories that are still happening.

It takes time to digest and consider, though maybe that's a vestige of an old fashioned way of thinking. In the era of instant gratification and computers that can pull up anything in the bl- of an eye (that's like, less than half a blink), maybe the new way of being is to reunite before there is any separation.

So why does this come to mind now? I got a message from my roommate from my first year of college recently. He showed me a picture of a hall mate of ours and we got to chatting. For the first time in over 30 years, we talked about some of the stories that developed during that year. We have spoken once or twice in the interim but those conversations were about current family and life concerns, not about 1987. We laughed (virtually) at strange things we did and I was able to thank him for being exactly the kind of roommate I needed at that time. It was nice, but it was also 30+ years in the making.

I needed to grow and learn to recognize and appreciate. Maybe I had an inkling of this after I graduated. Maybe it dawned on me 5 years later. The point is, I wasn't ready to have that conversation, and see things in proper hindsight in September of my second year of college. We, or maybe just I, need to absorb, analyze and reflect and that takes time. I'm not saying I don't love that Google can find me things in an instant, but I think that there is real merit in not reconnecting until we are different enough people that we can stand outside of our experiences and evaluate them dispassionately. We can make sense of our lives through the lens of time and by dint of having had significant other life events which create a context in which we can trace our own development.

We get together with old friends. We look at old photos and watch old movies of ourselves as children. We reminisce -- there is no value to just miniscing the first time. We want to get back something far gone, not something that is still part of who we are. 

I know, this isn't a new idea. TV shows like "That was the Week that Was" and "Last Week Tonight" have lampooned the idea that we look at anything before yesterday's episode of The Bachelorette as "history," to be dissected, reconsidered and critiqued. But those shows do so as satire, poking fun at the entire idea that we can develop nuanced understandings of our world so quickly. Until we can create distant memories of things that didn't happen, we can't really talk about what did. Or something pithy like that. I, too, am still a work in progress.