Meeting yourself again

On looking back and revisiting old work

Orson Welles in an infinity mirror in Citizen Kane

Hey y’all,

My friend Chris Glass sent me an email a few days ago with a photo he took of my mom and me backstage at a conference in Cleveland on that very day in 2012.

Chris explained that he takes a little time every day to flip through his digital folders of 20 years worth of his daily photos. Usually, he does this with a cup of coffee in the morning before he works. He frequently unearths gems and photos he’d completely forgotten about, and uses them as excuses to say hello to his friends and loved ones.

He didn’t remember taking the photo and neither did I! I immediately texted it to my mom and later I called her and we tried to remember that day and what we were doing. We started reminiscing about all kinds of stuff.

The whole experience delighted me and filled me with so much joy — I felt as though Chris had given me a great gift. I started thinking about how generative generosity can be. How it sets off a chain reaction. I also thought about how creative sharing can be. How you bring new things in the world by simply connecting.

An old portion of the camera roll on my phone

The funny thing is, I’d spent a good portion of last week doing my own sifting through old photos on my phone. Not because I wanted to, but because my memory was full and I needed to clear some space. While looking for photos I could delete, I found all the photos I couldn’t delete — pictures of the kids I’d forgotten about, quotes from screenshots I never copied into my commonplace book, and other random images. What started out as a chore became fun, the ol’ walk down memory lane. (It takes me forever to clean for this very reason: I spend most of my time caught up looking through stuff I’d forgotten about.)

Retrospection, looking back, nostalgia — these things come to my mind at this time of year. It is the Gemini season of my “solar return,” better known as a birthday — that time of year when the sun is in the same spot as when you were born. (June 16 — Bloomsday!)

I’ve written a lot about this over the past few years, but I think looking back gets a bad wrap. It’s more cool to say you never look back. But I love re-reading old blog posts, revisiting old notebooks, and picking through old boxes of photos and artwork. Looking back doesn’t just remind me of where I’ve been, I think it gives me new ideas about where I should go next.