Dear little Jess,

It’s hard to know where to begin. I know you have a lot of questions. So I guess we should start with the bad news: I don’t have all the answers. Not even after all this time. You think that grown-ups know everything. It turns out we don’t. We’re all just making it up as we go along, trying to learn from our past experiences, and passing on the lessons we think are useful. That doesn’t mean that we know any better than you do. So first off: trust your instincts, make your own choices. You’re smarter than you realise.

To you, the future still seems vague and far away. The school year seems long, and the thought of actually finishing school and being ready to move out into the big, wide world on your own is almost inconceivable. But finish you will, and sooner than you think. Time flows much faster than you can appreciate, and before you know it you will have walked the meandering path that I followed to get here, to reach this moment. Me – you – now.

So the good news is: you’re going to make it! You will reach this point, and you will do so much along the way. You will fulfil (at least some of) your dreams, and do so many more things that you’re yet to even imagine. I know that right now you dream of riding horses on a ranch in the Rocky Mountains. Well, guess what? You will! You’ll go to Colorado, and Wyoming, and Montana, and you’ll ride horses and herd cattle, climb mountains and see more stars in the sky than you’ve ever seen before. You’ll see ospreys and flocks of wild turkeys, herds of elk and fields full of prairie dogs. It will be everything you’re dreaming of and so much more, because you’ll do it hand-in-hand with someone you love dearly and who loves you right back.

That’s right, you will find Love! Although be warned: Love is not what you think it is. It’s not the page in the back of your school planner decorated with doodles of hearts and flowers where you write the names of your favourite singers, and footballers, and friends. The contents of that page will change a lot before you leave school. But that’s ok, you’re still working out what you like and what you don’t like. Take your time on this, and don’t let anyone else influence your choices.

Love, though, the kind that you fall into, is something else entirely. It’s so much more complicated than you think. For a start, it’s not just one emotion; it’s everything, all of your feelings, all balled up together. Sometimes it will make you feel like you can fly, but there will be times when it causes you pain, too. Don’t worry, that’s all part of it. You will navigate your way through those feelings and come out the other side knowing more about love, and about yourself, and about the world.

The world, by the way, is not really as big as you think it is. Before you get to America, you’re going to go to all of those other countries you’ve read and dreamt about: you’ll take a boat across the Aegean sea, you’ll explore the souks of Marrakech, you’ll stand before the Taj Mahal, and you’ll climb the Great Wall of China. You can go anywhere you want. In a few years’ time you’ll write a geography paper on the isle of Arran and for some reason that will captivate your imagination almost as much as these world wonders. And then, some years later, you’ll go to Arran, too. Many, many times. The world really isn’t all that big. You will get to see a lot of it.

That said, the world is also much bigger than you think. There are so, so, so many people out there! Right now, school is more or less the limit of your social world, and you think it’s important to be liked by your peers. But you’re going to meet hundreds, thousands, of fascinating people in your life. Plenty of them will like you for who you are.

Of course, you’re lucky to have an amazing group of friends at school with you. Some of them are still your friends now, more than twenty years later. Others are not. The friends who stay close and the ones who don’t aren’t the people you might guess.

Friends will always be really important to you, but there will be times in your life when maintaining those friendships takes effort. Make the effort! Adult life is not usually centred around friendship the way that yours is, and sometimes you will have to consciously make time and energy for those relationships. They are worth it.

Speaking of time: use it wisely. Stop straightening your hair. This is a colossal waste of time; it’s practically straight already. Don’t bother with makeup. You look better without it, and everyone who means anything to you agrees. In all else, just slow down. Take the time to enjoy your morning shower, to notice the feel of the sun on your skin when you step out, to really taste your food when you eat it. These things, when you learn to pay attention to them, will bring you so much pleasure.

Time is short, but life is not a race. You are not falling behind if you choose to take the scenic route. My advice is to always take the scenic route – it’s much more pleasant! Take chances. Don’t be afraid of failure. And if you ever get the feeling that you’re heading in the wrong direction, know that it’s ok to change course. 

Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep learning languages. These things will take you places.

And finally, one last, concrete piece of advice: in 2015, when a very tall friend-of-a-friend invites you over for dinner – go! Do not cancel! He’s important. You need him in your life, and the sooner the better. Trust me on this. Trust me on all of this.

Take it easy,

(Big?) Jess x

The post Letter to My Pre-Teen Self appeared first on Oftentimes Irregardless.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

I’ve often talked about being a writer. Or, to be more accurate, I’ve often talked about wanting to be a writer. This was the answer I would give when I was thirteen years old and people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and it’s still the answer I give now, twenty years later, when people ask (and they still do) what I want to be when I grow up. But, as is the case with so many dreams for so many people, I’ve never quite got around to making this happen. I’ve danced around the idea for a long time now, but never really dared to step out of the shallows, get my feet wet, take the plunge and write the things that I want to write.

Instead, I found easier, more comfortable ways to sustain myself on the edge of writing. I’ve studied writing, and taught writing, and written a lot about other people’s writing. I’ve kept journals, and diaries, and notebooks. I’ve scribbled thoughts, and quotes, and elegant turns-of-phrase overheard in cafés and on public transport on to whatever scraps of paper I had to hand at the time – napkins, old receipts, bookmarks, and (less romantically) my phone notepad – and stored all of these safely away for that one day, someday, when I feel ready to write something meaningful. Then, I think to myself, I will set these little gems into the bezels of my own words. “Then”: in that distant, abstract, nowhere-time when I’m finally ready to write something important.

All those notes are a kind of writing, of course, and although a lot of them are fragmentary, I have written plenty of complete pieces over the past decade too. In fact, I’ve spent most of my working time writing essays, research articles, conference papers, lesson plans, course programmes, and a 400-page behemoth of a thesis. All of this is writing of a kind, too, but none of it – not even the thesis that I dedicated so many years to – has ever really felt like my writing. In all of those pages (and pages and pages) I have shown very little of myself. Academic writing, by its nature, often seeks to obscure the author’s personality, preferring a facade of objectivity that (in the humanities at least) is rarely realistic, yet nevertheless often succeeds in sterilising a text, stripping it of its human identity. So, although I have written a lot, and made my way in the world this far mostly by writing, or thinking about writing, I’ve never really felt able to consider myself a writer. I haven’t felt like a real writer: a creative writer, free to articulate whatever thoughts are in my mind in whatever form feels most appropriate. This personal kind of writing is something I have shied away from, telling myself that I am biding my time, waiting for the right moment, the right circumstances, when I have the space, and peace, and inspiration to gather my thoughts and write from the heart.

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across an old interview with E. B. White in a 1969 issue of The Paris Review. In it, White speaks of the resoluteness required to become a writer. “A writer who waits for the ideal conditions under which to write,” he tells the interviewer, “will die without ever putting pen to paper.”

Death, I have found, has a particular way of focusing the mind. In the past two years, we have all been forced to look at the world anew through the lens of the pandemic. A large part of that has meant confronting the reality of our mortal condition in some way or another: whether passively, in the distant and impersonal tally of Covid deaths announced daily and repeated on every news bulletin, or in ways closer to home and altogether more personal. Many of us have experienced a bewildering something-in-the-middle. We have lost loved ones far away, been unable to see them in their final months, and then been prevented from paying our last respects in the usual, human ways. Anyone who has attended a funeral by livestream will know that death in the pandemic can feel deeply personal and unnervingly impersonal all at the same time.

Last summer, as I was finishing up that 400-page thesis, preparing to submit it online without having set foot in the university grounds for a full two years, and thinking about how strangely impersonal the end of many things had been in that time, my boyfriend introduced me to an app called WeCroak. On paper it sounds terrible: each day the app sends five randomly-scheduled notifications to your phone reminding you that you, one day, will die too. These arrive unexpectedly, and without sugar coating: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die,” the notification reads. Click on it, and it provides a short quotation – often literary or philosophical, sometimes spiritual, occasionally scientific – about the end of life. Yesterday, it sent me a quote from the 15th-century Indian mystic, Kabir Das: “Many have died; you also will die. The drum of death is being beaten. The world has fallen in love with a dream.” Before that, something more straightforward from the king of the Beats, Jack Kerouac: “I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die.” Some quotes are poetic, others are prosaic. They are impersonal in one sense (this is an automated app, after all) but each one fixes the mind on our very real, very personal mortality.

The inspiration for the app comes from a Bhutanese proverb, which states that to be happy one must contemplate death five times daily. The idea is not to evoke fear or dread, but the opposite: to normalise the inevitable, and make us more conscious of the finitude, and therefore value, of our lives. It is a memento mori for the present day. And it is strangely uplifting.

Why don’t we entertain this thought more often? We know that an awareness of our own impending doom is a great motivator and a signpost towards happiness: it helps us to whittle our life down to the things that really matter to us, and to invest our finite time and energy in the right places. When we lose sight of this, we waste our lives doing things that do not inspire us. When we keep our vision fixed and clear, we find the focus we need to live out our dreams. And why would any of us want to settle for anything less?

“When you walk more closely with death,” say the developers of WeCroak, “death keeps asking the question: Who do you want to be before you die?” The answer for me has always been the same: I want to be a writer.

So I am writing. Because life is short, and I want to be sure that I put my pen to paper before it’s too late. The conditions may not be ideal, and some of my thoughts may still be half-baked. But when the question is asked the answer is always there.

I want to be a writer.

So I am writing.

The post Memento mori, memento scribere appeared first on Oftentimes Irregardless.