Twelve years ago I did something. Not anything specific, I did a lot of things. But they were twelve years ago. It was me, I did them, and it was twelve years ago. We’re not talking swinging on a playground or eating dinner. Twelve years ago I smoked weed. I kissed people on wet lawns. I stole my dad’s car without a license and drove to an abandoned VFW-hall parking lot to learn about the world. I read passages of books which I can still recite to this day. I watched movies which altered my perception or, more accurately, added layers onto the perception I was slowly developing. I felt lonely, felt elated. Twelve years ago, I woke up.
I like this demarcation of time. I like casually mentioning this decade-plus which separates me from that kid. I like the gravitas of twelve, like what it implies. That I have learned a lot since then. That I am different now. That these moments have dissolved from experience into memory, have resurfaced as milky nostalgia, pleasant to sip on occasionally, offering no feelings besides the wistful ponderance of time.
I do not have many memories before the age of fifteen. I can recall very few specific events, don’t remember names or faces which I haven’t seen between then and now. Thoughtful friends have suggested that I may be blocking something from back there, but I think I just don’t feel connected to that younger version of myself. I define myself by my ideas, think of myself as the sum of my ruminations, and before the age of fifteen I didn’t have many ideas, didn’t ruminate. I have lived so many lives between then and now that I feel I may be overriding my database with ever-new experiences, rather than poring over old ones. Even my early twenties, my time in college, my early days in Los Angeles from 2019, are all a blur. I wonder, with the softest hint of melancholy, how much of today I will remember.
I will surely forget what I ordered at the diner this morning. Will surely forget waking up on a friend’s couch and hearing laughter in the other room. If not in five years, then certainly in ten. But will I forget the diner itself, Sunday mornings at Harding’s? Will I forget that birthday party last night? Wearing a leather jacket and singing Do Wah Diddy Diddy in a barbershop quintet, the impromptu arm-wrestling tournament, speaking to the cops in a skirt? How could I, and yet, how many similar nights from the last twelve years are inaccessible to me now?
I turned twenty-seven a few weeks ago. It feels like its been months since that dinner at Sitar, since wearing a suit and taking a long pause before blowing out my candles to make good use of the tradition and summon the perfect wish. I don’t remember what that wish was.
Maybe it’s a symptom of a lot of moving, of many friends over the years, many of whom are nearly strangers to me now. Maybe it’s that the vessels which other folks store memories in— their neighborhood, their companions, the apartment they live in or the car they drive— have been such fluid, evolving factors in my life. Maybe I’m just stuck living in the future, and maybe I’ll catch up with that vision, maybe one day I will arrive in that future and feel utterly present. A friend of mine, a dying man in his forties, once told me that most of his life feels meaningless, and that it wasn’t until he began practicing his vocation that he really started living. He described it as the feeling of life being right up against your face. Colors grow brighter, experience stings like waves of cold water. I told him I wasn’t sure I’ve gotten there yet, but I’m not sure why I said that. It’s not true. Life has felt like that for me since I was fifteen.
When I ‘came online,’ when I started seeing the world outside of the small town I grew up in, when I began imagining splendid versions of what life may be and, in one way or another, pursuing them— that is when my consciousness was born. When the me that changed into the me of today started existing. In some ways that kid is the same person I am today. In many more, he is a stranger. But twelve years ago I existed, twelve years ago I planted seeds, some of which have yet to blossom. Twelve years ago I forged dreams the outcome of which I’ve yet to witness.
Sometimes I’ll fear that the long-view of my life is moving too slowly, that I’m not where I ought to be at this juncture. And if I zero in, if I focus on the short-term, it’s much the same feeling. There is little more to my name than there was yesterday. I have sixty less dollars, and one more essay. This is not the pace I have envisioned for myself. But when I look at, say, a year— suddenly I see growth, I see a pattern of production emerge, a healthy mix of sowing and harvesting. I see the words to my name grow, see my career bud in strange, idiosyncratic bursts. I have a year less to my life, have the same apartment in the same city, but I am closer to some archetype in my mind that is the Ryan to my ryan. That archetype, too, has morphed. It has molded to my evolved understanding of reality. It has made concessions, and in other ways has strived for more.
This medium-term approach, this game of leaps and pauses, is like the process of learning an instrument. You can play every day, and hardly notice improvement. It might feel like you’ve plateau’d, especially if you obsess over the high rate of progress of your first couple months of playing. That era when every day you picked it up you learned something new. But if you take a break, if you forget to touch it for a few days at a time, when you play it again you are shocked at how well you do. You feel like the lessons you were struggling to conquer have been cemented into muscle memory. Those aspirations become a struggle of your past, the struggle disappeared, the new skill now unlocked. This medium-term vista, this proper contextualization of progress, is different for everyone, and it changes all the time. It may not be a helpful perception for day-to-day struggles or Present Living, nor is it good for the part of us in charge of forging dreams. But it is the perfect scope for a healthy appreciation of a sustainable and fulfilling rate of growth.
When I think of the inner treasures gained in my last year of life— when I think of lessons learned, love garnered, core-experiences logged— I realize with but a little dread how much more holy the experience of life is, how much more I have to lose. In this medium-term approach, I’m able to pause, to sit in something like gratitude, and strum the violin which I now sorta know how to play.
This is not a quote from Kerouac, but I thought it up while reading Dharma Bums, so he gets some credit for it. It compares life to a hike. Where you must keep your eyes to the ground, ever-mindful of roots and rocks, ever cautious about the space a few feet ahead, careful not to trip, mindful of the ground and appreciative of the immediate beauty around you. Every so often, you should look far ahead. You might pause to do this, you might risk a few feet of steps to get a sense of where you are headed; what turns you’ll be taking, how the terrain might change, how quickly you want to work to get there. Only rarely, only when the overwhelming urge overcomes you, should you stop, turn around, and look at how far you’ve come. Look over the scope of your journey and breathe it in. Study the contours of a distant mountain which you will not experience on this hike, may never know but for its vague impression on the horizon.
I think some people hike backwards, remaining hyper-focused on the ground which they just covered. Ancient greeks visualized time like this, asserting that to move through linear space was to move with your back to the future, as the present washes over your head. Now, we think of moving forward into time. Some folks train their sights so far ahead that they trip, or miss the flowers on the ground beside the trail. In times of difficulty or euphoria, we feel the tendency to keep our eyes down, to remain extra conscious of each step, to perhaps look just behind us after making a trepidatious maneuver.
If there’s one thing my poor memory tells me, it’s that I don’t take enough stock of the distance I’ve come. That I’m perhaps saving that glance back down for some imagined balcony at the top of the trail. Living, you might argue, under the delusion that the trail even has a top. That it won’t just meander and meander until it dissolves into a void. I suppose this essay is one of those pauses. One of those moments, precious and rare and utterly distracting, where I want to allow myself the gratification of having done a good bit of living, having scouted so much terrain, having come so far.
shit man, i'm real glad you're hiking up substack mountain. what a journey it's been.
you are such a freak i love u