Things We Decided Long Ago
A little magazine about things worth noticing
A Note Before We Begin
Every morning gives us a new day.
But many of us wake up and quietly become the same person again.
The one shaped by old mistakes. Old judgments. Old explanations of what we’re capable of.
The past doesn’t control us because it happened.
It controls us because of the meaning we give it.
I’ve been thinking about that lately.
Not because I think we should reinvent ourselves.
I’ve always been a bit suspicious of reinvention.
But maybe sometimes we just need to look again.
The Conclusions We Keep
I think we underestimate how many decisions about our lives were made a long time ago. Not the big decisions, the quiet ones, the ones we don’t remember making.
At some point, maybe when we were young, something happened and we decided what it meant. Someone didn’t choose us, and we decided we weren’t good enough. We failed at something, and we decided we weren’t capable. Someone laughed when we spoke, and we decided we shouldn’t say too much. We tried something and it went badly, and we decided it wasn’t for us. Maybe someone told us who we were. Maybe we told ourselves.
And then we went on living.
That’s the strange part. The event disappears. The conclusion stays. Years later, we may not remember exactly what happened, only the person we became afterward. We call it personality: I’m just not that kind of person. We call it wisdom: I know how these things turn out. We call it realism: that’s just the way life is.
Sometimes it is. But sometimes we’re still enforcing a verdict whose evidence expired years ago.
I once had a co-worker who had stopped applying for certain jobs. He wasn’t unqualified. He simply had a memory of being rejected once, years earlier, he’d forgotten most of the details. He hadn’t forgotten what it meant.
There’s something almost funny about the human mind. We can forget the evidence and keep the verdict. The court doesn’t reconvene. No one’s filed an appeal in years. The ruling just sits there, quietly hardening into law that we’ve stopped thinking to question.
And perhaps that’s one of the privileges of getting older. We accumulate enough distance to question some of our old verdicts. Not all of them, some were right, some things really did teach us something. But wisdom may not be in knowing which conclusions were correct. It may be in becoming willing to examine them again.
I think about the different people I’ve been. Some of them were frightened. Some were certain, some ambitious, some stubborn. Some thought they understood people, some thought they understood themselves. They were all working with the information they had, and I’ve stopped trying to talk them out of what they believed. The younger man didn’t have the older man’s evidence, he couldn’t have, he hadn’t lived long enough to collect it. I’m pretty sure the older man doesn’t have all of it either.
Maybe that’s true for most of us too. We keep carrying conclusions forward because they once helped us make sense of the world. But a conclusion can be useful without being permanent.
So every once in a while, it’s worth asking: What have I been treating as a fact that might only be an old conclusion? Not because the answer changes anything by itself. It might not. But sometimes the smallest revision changes something important.
I have at least one door like that myself, one I’ve told myself for years must be locked. I haven’t gone back to try the handle. I’m not sure I want to know.
TINY STORIES:
The Box
Last week, I opened a box I’d labeled:
“Old Stuff”
I expected nostalgia.
Instead, I found a pair of reading glasses, a bus ticket, a postcard, and a key I couldn’t place.
None of it made me miss the past.
It made me notice the different people I used to be.
Every one of them thought they had finally figured things out.
I smiled at that.
I thought the box was full of old things.
I didn’t realize it was full of former selves.
The Report Card
A boy grows up hearing he isn’t smart.
He struggles in school.
After a while, nobody questions it.
Least of all him.
At seventy-two, while cleaning out his attic, he finds an old report card.
One teacher had written:
“He asks questions no one else thinks to ask.”
He reads the sentence again.
Then he smiles.
Strange how a life can follow one sentence...
long after everyone has forgotten who first said it.
The Coffee Shop
Last month I noticed a man who came into the coffee shop every morning.
He never looked up.
Never chatted.
Never smiled.
Without noticing, I’d started filling in the blanks.
Yesterday I caught myself thinking:
“There he goes again.”
Again?
We’d barely spoken.
I’d mistaken a handful of quiet moments for a whole person.
I realized I’d been responding to the story I’d written about him...
not the man.
We think we’re seeing people as they are.
More often, we’re seeing the meaning we’ve given them.
The Last Time
I didn’t realize how many things I was experiencing for the last time.
The last time I carried my children.
The last time I saw my parents.
The last time I looked around and everyone I loved was still here.
Nobody tells you when it’s the last time.
That’s part of what makes life so strange.
We spend so much time waiting for something important to happen.
Meanwhile, something important is quietly happening.
We rarely know when we’re living through the days we’ll miss most.
Ready
We can spend years becoming someone who is finally ready.
Reading. Preparing. Learning. Training.
Waiting for the version of ourselves who won’t be afraid.
And then one day we realize:
That person never arrives.
We don’t discover what we were capable of by becoming ready.
We discover it by doing the thing before we were.
OMT NOTES:
Things I’ve been thinking about.
A Memory Can Be Accurate
A memory can be accurate and still give us the wrong lesson.
Knowing Ourselves
Maybe some of what we call “knowing ourselves” is simply remembering the conclusions we’ve reached about ourselves.
Changing Our Minds
I used to think changing my mind meant I’d been wrong.
Now I think sometimes it means I’ve finally collected enough evidence to be more accurate.
The People We Miss
There are people we miss because we loved them.
And there are people we miss because we liked who we were when we were with them.
Those aren’t always the same thing.
An Advantage of Age
Aging has a strange advantage.
You get to see some of your certainties expire.
QUESTIONS WOTH CARRYING:
You don’t have to answer these. Some questions are useful simply because they stay with us.
What if the thing we need to change is the explanation?
Which things in our lives are still governed by conclusions we no longer believe?
What if some of our oldest beliefs are simply memories that were never re-examined?
What if the explanation we accepted at twenty-five no longer deserves authority now?
What if we aren’t missing the person? But, we’re missing who we were with them?
One More
What if the past hasn’t changed? But our evidence about it has?
If This Made You Think Of Something...
Maybe an old conclusion.
A person you suddenly see differently.
A sentence someone said to you years ago.
A former version of yourself.
If something came to mind while reading this, I’d like to hear about it.
Leave a comment, or just reply to this email.
I read them.
OLD MAN TALKS:
We’re all still figuring this out. That’s probably a good thing.
Until next week… remember to “look again.”
So much of the abusive toxic stuff called my past was twirling around in my mind, causing pain and confusion, surfacing seemingly out of nowhere until I decided to tell my life story in the form of journaling. Every time a memory would surface I’d write about it. Before I knew it, memories emerged hot and heavy and I couldn’t keep up. So I listed them in the back of the journal so I wouldn’t forget. Writing about them brought them about of the Shadows as Jung would say where they were screaming for resolution. Little by little as I wrote, my mind cleared. And I seemed to receive clarity. The work probably won’t ever be done but the past no longer defines me.
A blaming, shaming, swearing and argumentative me - anything to not be wrong. Def a desperate, unhealthy part of me.