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Jeremy's Shower Thoughts

Grist for your mill

Published onApr 20, 2022
Jeremy's Shower Thoughts
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Go ahead and blow on this!

Introductory thoughts: why Jeremy can’t sleep some nights

Jeremy Stapleton here. The world woke up with a billion memories stretching across a half century. I’m not going to wax philosophical. Except now. I’ve got a thousand new shower thoughts. These are a few of them. Indulge me.

This is not a movie where a small team of wary time travelers avoid changing so much as a dandelion growing in the park, just in case this change might alter the time line catastrophically so they would return to the future to find it a smoldering nuclear ruin. Slap that mosquito and you might never have been born.

This is movie where the future is the plot, and the last thing we want is what we’ve already seen. Change is not the problem. Change is the project.

Every morning, I wake up inside a mental envelope that I am certain didn’t exist for me a couple months ago—which was also fifty-two years from now. I feel an intense emotional calmness, a profound lack of worry about today, tomorrow, and the future. I’ve begun to sort this feeling out.

Living life again is nothing like living it the first time, in terms of attitude. I’m totally free from generalized anxiety. My armor is gone. I can stand naked in front of tomorrow. If this were only me, I’d consider a paid gig as a rogue, somewhat Buddhist, guru. “How I learned to stop worrying and love the present.” However, this feeling is likely shared by most of the timedrifters. We’re all bozos on this bus.

Imagine the future as a carnival side-show fun house. By waking up tomorrow, you’ve bought a ticket to enter, and you fully expect to get scared. It’s the point of going in. You startle, and you scream and laugh. Then you are out the other side, until you wake up the next day to a different fun house. That’s what the future holds the first time around; an endless supply of different, scary fun houses. The future is scary. I mean, you just never know.

Then someone gives you another ticket to the very same fun house you visited already. This time, nothing scares you. That’s what being sixty-seven and fifteen at the same time feels like. It’s like I own the future. Nothing crushed or killed me the last time: not the reckless driving moments, not the various recreational drugs, not the occasional sprains and aches, not the serial broken-heart disappointments, not even the hyper-competitive marketplace I faced. Nothing the world tossed at me broke me. So what should I fear this time?

Instead, I’ve got this crazy amount of energy. It’s like all that worry has been diverted into my creativity warp drive, and I am cruising at Warp 11. Thank you, Scotty!

I have to smile about the internet billionaires who once rode unicorn start-ups into crypto-currency fortunes, and those politicians who now remember the sheer luck that put them into places of power and influence, and bankers who will again need to mud-wrestle their way into that plum job at JP Morgan Chase or HSBC.

At the societal level, all the shady business deals that robbed towns of their taxes and then their jobs, the environmental shortcuts that poured toxins into local waters and chemicals into the skies, the worthless promises made by political candidates—all those vapid visions of “better times ahead,” to be paid for with more pain in the “short run”that ran your whole lifetime—these events are locked into the heads and hearts of the hundreds of millions who came back from the future.

Out in the workplace and inside families, we have the memories of millions of personal acts of subtle cruelty, calculated indifference, or intentional harm. These cannot go unchallenged the next time. And the next time starts today. Each sad family is sad in its own way, as Tolstoy noted. In this 1967, that sadness is a future event with a memory trail. You don’t want or need to dive back into that particular sadness if you can fix it first.

The unspoken truth is that the lies and the cruelty were buffered by many more acts of kindness and concern, measures of empathy and caring. Unfortunately, we remember the slap far better than the kiss, the stumble more than the helping hand. Without a continuous coriolis of kindness and care, most of us timedrifters would not have been above ground in 2019.

Some of us gave love and got love in return, like the Marley song. Fast friendships and families we could rely on, devoted lovers and mates for a week, or a decade, or more. We added our own love into these relationships. Half a century of loving and being loved; this too is tucked into our current personhood. Some missed out on love. Fractured families, lonely lives; we’ve been there. Now it’s up to us to make the next fifty years a time when love will find us. We all deserve love.

Some of us also got wise. Wisdom doesn’t just show up. It’s not a door prize you win for turning old. You find it hiding in the pain of your mistakes, and the traps you fell into along the way. A billion people carry the wisdom they earned incrementally in the future/past here to 1967. I’m thinking our new future is going to be a different place and a really interesting time to live through. Guess what? Now is the next time for everything.

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