BunkoSquad

OK. You made it this far.

At work, we thought it would be a cool idea if everyone brought in pictures of themselves as babies or toddlers, so we could all giggle at the clothes of the late 70s and early 80s and try to guess which baby turned into which hip, clever colleague. Sounds fun, right? So there I am, picking through a few old pictures I have and a really cool booklet my sister made me a few birthdays ago, with more old pictures, and suddenly had a kind of out-of-body experience. And describing it is a little tricky, so please bear with me.

I had always looked at old pictures of myself with a mixture of amused shame and small regret. The inch-thick glasses, the short shorts, the perpetually open mouth (why it was always open for pictures, I'll never know) -- they were clearly picture of a younger me. I never thought of it any other way. But suddenly, I started seeing them a little differently. What if, I thought, this wasn't an old me, but rather a distinct individual? What if, somewhere in the space-time continuum, there still is a dorky little 10-year-old who's confident that his ability to finish word-search puzzles quickly, recite all 50 states in alphabetical order, and compute slugging percentages will be adequate tools for getting through the rest of his life?

(On a side note, I guess that also means that, somewhere in the space-time continuum, there's a timebomb of a 19-year-old waiting to explode in an avalanche of apathy, doubt and self-destructiveness that will spiral down the years to the point where he can't sustain a goddamn metaphor through an entire goddamn sentence, but that may be a tale for another day.)

What would I say if I ran into that 10-year-old? I presumably know more about the ways of the world than he does; I presume that if I could convince him that I was his future self, he'd accept and take to heart my counsel. So where to begin? What's the message I wish some "wiser" adult had shared with me?

I guess it boils down to this: don't live your life afraid. A lot of life really sucks and is repetitive and humdrum and filled with an utter lack of transcendent moments. You can accept this, and bemoan it, and let it gnaw away at yourself or you can challenge it. Take a damn risk once in a while. I think the kid in question might appreciate a convoluted baseball analogy, so here goes: sometimes you need to throw a hit-and-run or a squeeze play into your repertoire. Maybe you'll hit into a double play, or maybe you'll knock in the winning run - either way, you'll get the crowd buzzing in a way that looking for a bases-loaded walk will never do. And gambling managers are always looked at with more admiration than the guys who play it safe (I obviously don't mean the Pete Rose gambling). End convoluted baseball analogy.

All the great thinkers have dealt with this. Tennyson said "It's better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." Neil Young said, "it's better to burn out than to fade away." If you keep charging, sometimes you'll get knocked on your ass, but you can spring up again. If you stand still and just slowly sink to the floor, it's hard to get up.

I'd tell the kid that everything in life is so damn temporary anyway, it's worth it to take a chance. Maybe I wouldn't want to scare him away, but I should probably tell him all about opportunities that I've had, but never followed up on, only to see the moment pass. Friends -- girl friends (two words) -- that I've wondered if I should risk taking the next step with, only to see the friendship lost in distance and time anyway. People who could have been lifelong friends and allies, except that it would have required a (so minor!) change in my habits and patterns and trends -- which I would have soon fallen out of anyway.

Is this all making sense? I hope not...I'd hate to be that transparent.

The other thing I would try to convey to that kid is how, when all is said and done, you've got to still live inside yourself. Eventually, you're going to be at a point where all the outside distractions and social ramble and fooferaw is going to be gone -- if only for a time -- and you're going to be alone with nothing but your mind. And it would behoove him to try to force that mind outwards, to seek new things and challenge it, rather than let the mind turn on itself and try to devour itself in a feast of doubt and second-guessing and mangled metaphors (like, for instance, this manifesto).

So...what questions would that kid have for me? Maybe he'd ask where his life should be when he reaches his (let's pick an arbitrary number here) 30th birthday. Maybe he'd be afraid that at 30, his skillset would consist of little more than customer service, basic HTML, a working knowledge of the infield-fly rule, and some (admittedly cool) geography-related party tricks. Oh yeah; and a penchant for rambling psychiatric self-diagnosis. Actually, on second thought, if he asked that, I'd probably call in Ari Fleischer to deflect/redirect that particular question.

The other questions he might ask, and that I couldn't convincingly answer: How do you do it? How do you make that leap of faith that lets you shake up your comfort level (slight though it may be) and take that risk? How do you challenge yourself, and force yourself to follow through with the challenge, so you don't end up at 30 with a list of regrets (roughly) three times longer than your list of satisfactory accomplishments? And when is it too late to take that leap? I've had several people tell me, "30 is the new 21!", but everyone who tells me that is a damnsight closer to 21 than to 30. And, related to that, wherein lies the difference between a groove and a rut?

So, stumped by these questions, I'd have to come up with some cogent advice for him to take into the next 20 years of his life. I'd say Satchel Paige's rules would be a good place to start, but I've broken four of the six rules since I started writing this piece. I googled other "rules of life", but nothing seemed to exactly fit. I guess, in the end, the best advice I could give him is you've got to forge your own way. In the end, you have to stand before your younger self (or, failing a workable time-travel solution, a mirror) and account for yourself.

And I guess that comes to the crux of why I wrote this; absent a 50-year-old version of myself appearing with more advice, I'll fill in what I think he'd say. Something like "You've got to live for yourself, not for your perception of what others expect of you. Your successes and failures will come and go, but make them yours."

And with that, probably the longest post in BunkoSquad history, I enter the fourth decade of my life with...that. Thanks for listening.