The reality of time's passing hits you with a stunning sort of UN-reality when out of the blue you realize, "Wait. I was twelve.......FIFTY YEARS ago."
And you think, no, I must be counting wrong, that couldn't be ME who was twelve FIFTY years ago. Wasn't it twenty? Thirty at the outside?
But a quick recount (and no hanging chads) only confirms what you're sure just can't be. It WAS fifty.
Hello.
Maybe it's so stunning because there are ways that being twelve seems more like "just yesterday" than being forty does. Yes, forty really does seem more distant and shadowy to me than twelve does. Twelve feels like five minutes ago. Forty, by comparison, strikes me as something vaguely signalling from a remote galaxy.
Perhaps, neurologically speaking, it's because at twelve you are still living a child's timeless existence, in a world you perceive as a constant, where nothing will ever change. (Yet you are also perceiving it with a capacity for interpretation that has just take a quantum leap of development, on the cusp of adolescence, so the impressions are all the more vivid yet.) Because you take it as "fixed" it gets correspondingly "fixed" (with all the stark impressions and sensations of childhood) in your mind as the Constant, the Way Things Are. Paradoxically, that's what it therefore remains in there, in the archives of your brain, even when it has already long been Not The Way Things Are.
When you're forty you know better, of course. And because you know better, the circumstances of your forty-year-old world aren't neurologically impressed as a self-evidently permanent cognitive fixture.
So what was "fixed" is more readily available to your cognitive Rolodex--right there at your fingertips, as it were--than what was registered as ephemeral even as it transpired.
Weirdly, then, the way you saw it when it happened created what it was to be and remain as a part of you forever. By registering a moment of your life as the Constant, you effectively MADE it that cognitively. By registering another moment as the Ephemeral, that's what you made THAT in your memory. And as such they more or less stick. Even though there wasn't a scrap of difference between them spatio-temporally. The same laws of physics applied to both moments, after all. But not the same laws of mind.
Which, for some reason, brings me back to the original thought: can it really be FIFTY YEARS? But, then again, why shouldn't it be? If "twelve" seems like five minutes ago, then...what do the fifty years mean? Why not sixty or seventy? Such criteria can't push "twelve" further back, if you follow me.
Why, when you stop to think about it, should the sense of fifty years passing be more cognitively real than the five minutes ago that being twelve seems?
Both are real.
Yes, I think we need both, and neither one cancels the other. Both are real parts of who and what we are, the cognitive reality of our humanness.
It strikes me now that one reason for this cognitive independence, or call it warping if you like, of time, is that we actually NEED an inner archive of (pardon this violence to the English language) us's. A catalogue of me's, as it were. In your case, a catalogue of you's. And for the archive to be maintained in "fresh" condition, fifty years ago HAS to "seem" like five minutes ago. It's a function of the archive.
The reason we need the archive is, each "you" that you were at various places in life perceived, registered, processed, interpreted and came to certain convictions about the whole complex called Life with all its feelings, faces, needs, desires, fears, knowns and unknowns, etc.
Let's call that complex the WLI (What Life Is).
Your inner life is a catalogue of WLIs. They are naturally interlinked and flow into each other, yet at the same time a sequence of distinct units is easily discerned. Just as with history (this IS history, after all). You might not easily tell from two photographs which was taken in 2019 and which in 2011, but you have no problem telling the difference between family photos from 2019, 1990, 1970 and 1950.
And while, yes, we do grow and learn MORE, perpetually modifying our WLI theory along the way as we SHOULD, we also misinterpret, make mistakes, forget or betray things that count, stuff feelings and flee from unresolved, seemingly hopeless trails, frustrated beginnings, etc.
I think the inner archive of "me's" is there to cross-check with. Grow though we might, learn more though we might, expand in grasp and outlook and wisdom though we might, there is ALWAYS the possibility, even likelihood, that some other "you" back there in the archive, at a discernibly, qualitatively different WLI...knew something that you don't.
Why don't you know it?
Well, there's any number of reasons, but let's just say you forgot.
And that's what the 12-year-old you is still there for. Or the 25-year-old you. Or the 40-year-old you. Their sensations, impressions, insights and WLI deductions represent whole real worlds. They represent, in part, the unfathomable multi-verse that you are.
They are there, at times leaping out of the archives, because they have things to remind you about. Important things you forgot.
But sometimes they show up for a different reason: because THEY'RE still waiting and hoping to get answers. From you. Important answers they still need.
I suspect the reason some of them appear vividly on the cognitive screen while others are vague and shadowy is, the ones you're still pretty much the same as (like "me at 40") are in no particular need of making their presence known, either for your sake or theirs, if you follow me. If you could get on the horn and check in with them, they'd say, "Doing just fine. Don't call me, I'll call you."
The ones who leap out of the archives onto cognitive center stage, though, whether they hail from a 50-year-old WLI or a 5-year-old one (it all depends on what's transpired in between), those are the ones with an urgent message, or need. Either way, their arrival is good, because they wouldn't show up if the moment weren't fortuitous. They only show up because you're ready. Whether you knew it or not. That's their first job, in fact: to announce that you're ready.
All of this is one reason I find it unbearably distasteful to hear anyone "diss" their earlier self: "Oh, I was just a naive, ridiculous, oblivious dolt back then, without a clue in the world what really counted or what I existed for."
No, life is never like that. That's never the totality of what anyone is.
You may have been naive (who isn't?), at times ridiculous, clueless about most things (again, who isn't?), but...no, don't kill anyone in the archives. It's murder. The WLI you're most inclined to purge from the record is the one hammering on the archive doors to get out, now, and...meet you, finally. To give and take what must be given and taken.
"Love your neighbor as yourself."
You can't murder the WLIs in your inner archives yet love your neighbor. You might tolerate your neighbor, barely, but, no, not love.
