Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 120 - Time Machine
Everyone has a time machine. For some, it’s a box of old letters. For others, a half-finished sticker album or a school report buried in a drawer. This week, I found myself sorting through mine.
Welcome to Issue 120 of Deep Life Reflections.
An essay I read this week coincided with the hours I’ve spent sorting through my personal possessions ahead of a move back to Europe.
I wanted to share a few thoughts while they’re still fresh.
Perhaps they might resonate with you.
Taking full advantage of our own experiences
The American author Marilu Henner once said, “We all owe it to ourselves as living beings to take full advantage of our own experiences.”
Henner is one of about a hundred people in the world with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). The condition was first identified in 2006 and has two defining characteristics: the person spends an abnormally large amount of time thinking about their past, and they have an extraordinary capacity to recall specific events in detail.
For some, it’s a curse. For others, like Henner, it’s a gift:
“It’s something that makes me feel really good, and I can’t imagine not having it.”
Chronicling a life
I came across Henner’s story in an essay by David Owen in The New Yorker called How to Live Forever.
Owen has been chronicling his life, and his family’s, for years. He built a set of archives from the world of the physical and digital—photos, letters, emails, notes, serious and poignant discussions on topics from pets to politics, marriage to divorce. He continues to collect, organise, and preserve these memories and mementos.
It started in his youth, when he tried several times to keep a diary but never managed to make it stick for more than a week or two. It’s a common issue. Today’s popular Gratitude Diary often runs out of steam because there are only so many times one can be grateful for their health and family.
Owen shares a story about finding a diary about a dozen years ago that his daughter, Laura, had started when she was ten. It had a pink cover with a lock on the front which wasn’t locked. A hundred ruled pages. The entry on the first page was about her piano lessons. It said:
EXTRA MINUTES PRACTICES
Wednesday—1 min.
Saturday—8 min.
All the other pages were blank.
Intentionality in our lives
Documenting and curating our lives intentionally isn’t easy, and for many, it isn’t particularly motivating either. Besides, we have our phones now where we can capture those special moments in a simple click.
But Owen believes intentional curation gives context in a way that thousands of unedited, unsorted photos on iCloud or Google can't.
“Turning the pages of a physical book is a different experience from swiping a finger across a screen. That isn't an intelligible narrative of a life,” Owen argues.
I agree with him.
During Covid, Owen realised he could create a truly comprehensive chronicle of his life by collating all the best parts of his digitised archive into a single PDF document. The result was a document 1.5 million words long, and it continues to grow by around 500 words a day. (I can see my sister shudder if I ever told her I was undertaking such a task.)
He attempted to do what Elmore Leonard said he tried to do with his novels: leave out the parts that readers skip.
On his creation, Owen says, “I'm the only reader so far, and I may be the only reader ever, but I don't want even my own interest to flag.”
A powerful view of time and mortality
Mirroring Henner’s words, Owen has been doing all this because it’s interesting to him. He believes his preservation project has given him a powerful view of time and mortality, allowing him to travel backwards and forwards, surrounded by photos, letters, email excerpts, still adding images to text, reading and rereading. Until the end.
As he sees it, the simplest way to extend life is to do so backward, by adding years in reverse.
He is a modern-day time traveller.
If David Owen is a DeLorean owner from 1985, I have his spare set of keys.
Generally, I try and live by the principle of minimalism—the less clutter, the better I function, whether that clutter is physical or mental. But I also love to preserve. With intention.
That’s the thing with my kind of minimalism—it requires trade-offs.
While some people are happy to ditch everything, others hoard for life. We all know a hoarder and we all know a ditcher. I’m somewhere in between, but with a bias of keeping only what’s interesting to me. Like Owen.
And that brings me to this week, and sorting through decades-old possessions.
Do they stay or go?
Below, I’ve picked out five that felt worth keeping.
1. Back To The Future Sticker Album
The official Panini sticker album of the 1985 classic film. A fully completed album of 180 stickers—except for one. The sticker space for No.127 has remained blank for the better part of 40 years. An early metaphorical lesson for life perhaps. Do we all complete our albums? Unlikely. Be happy with what we have.
And it’s still a great film.
2. A Short Story I Wrote When I Was Ten
Back in 1986, the literary world was given a gift. Sadly, it wasn’t my first short story effort, The Time Machine. Preserved by my mum somehow, it was revisionist history at its best. In the story, I invented a time machine and travelled back to 1492, landing on Columbus’ ship to help him discover America. An early example of a child’s instinct to leave a mark.
In this case, I actually discovered America, not Columbus. One to keep in mind for my American readers celebrating the Fourth of July holiday today.
3. Roy of the Rovers—My First and Last Edition
I bought my first issue of popular UK football comic, Roy of the Rovers, in July 1986 from a petrol station in the south of England (channeling my Marilu Henner there). I was drawn to the carnage on its front page: the fictional team, Melchester Rovers, had been involved in a bus wreckage, mirroring the real-life tragedy of the Munich air disaster involving Manchester United 18 years earlier. Roy survived. His will to continue inspired by the loss of those around him.
And I kept reading every week until the final edition of the comic in 1993 when Roy Race finally hung up his boots.
(Many years ago, I threw out the hundreds of issues I’d collected over the years, keeping only the first and last.)
4. Emails From September 11, 2001
I was 25 and working for a financial services company on September 11, 2001—my first job, my first company. As that dark day unfolded, I began a series of back-and-forth emails with friends as the realisation of what was happening played out in real time. The urge to record, even amid the chaos. I saved all the emails in a folder, and a few years later, when I left the company, I printed them and placed them in an A4 folder, where they remain to this day.
A live record of the most consequential day of the 21st century so far.
For posterity.
5. My English School Report Aged 15
When I was 15, my English teacher, Tom Pow, noted in my report card: “James can write imaginatively and perceptively but he has been too erratic.” The underlining of erratic was his emphasis, not mine. I like to think Mr Pow would be happier with my consistency now—and hopefully the imagination and perception haven’t waned either.
As well as being my English teacher, Tom Pow is a poet and writer. Several of his collections have won awards, and three of his poetry collections were shortlisted for Scottish Book of the Year. Having good teachers in life is consistent with the desire to continuously improve.
We don’t often keep school reports, but I’m glad I kept this one.
Do you still keep mementos of your past, and if so, what do they mean to you?
Thanks for taking this journey in time with me this week. It was good to spend a few hours putting these reflections into words. Now it’s back to the sorting, but perhaps with a little more clarity.
Oh, and if anyone has any ideas on what to do with a 500-CD collection that I haven’t used in years, I’d love to hear.
Enjoy your weekend. Stay intentional.
James
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