I've really been enjoying middle age after decades of flinching at comets.
Shit, as innumerable sages have observed, happens. Until you've developed triage skills, you can never be sure what can really persecute you, derail you, ruin you, hurt you, kill you, or, worst of all, "go on your permanent record" (the most PTSD-inducing phrase ever devised). So you devote most of your time and attention to a frantic game of whack-a-mole. As with all ordeals, you don't realize how bad it was until you've gotten past it.
You can't outrun the ordeal via distance, but you can outlive it via time. At age 57 I don’t freak out much, because I know what to disregard and what to address. I know what passes easily and what passes painfully yet nonetheless passes. I know why people do what they do, and I know it hardly ever has anything to do with me.
"Don't Take Anything Personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering."
A real world example of this calming level of self-knowledge: I just had two trivial tasks to deal with. I knew from experience that I'd probably forget task #2 while executing task #1. And while it was trivial, I know that daemons never die. Every alarm you've ever set for yourself still rings, stridently but very softly, just below conscious awareness.
So I'm very judicious about setting mental alarms (i.e. daemons - subliminal processes that are just as vexing as the demons of folklore). That's why I write stuff down. Before I did task #1, task #2 was scrawled onto my to-do list, though most people would never have bothered to record such a trivial and transient thing. The very act of recording it relieved me of burden. Another demon slain!
It wasn't a question of ensuring that the task got done. I just saved myself from setting an internal alarm (i.e. unleashing a demon), which would have forever throbbed along with the billions of previous alarms (i.e. screaming demons from hell).
I always figured old people wrote stuff down because they were forgetful and feeble. That's completely wrong. Young people are at least as feebly forgetful, but they lack self-awareness. They don't remember better, they just haven't yet owned up to their forgetfulness. Like buffoons in comedy movies, they divide their time between 1. messing up, and 2. cluelessly refreshing their delusions of competence.
I've learned from long experience that I'm a screw-up. So I write stuff down, which takes just a sec, and I live competently and calmly. 30 years ago, my failure rate was high and I was a wreck. So who's the feeble one?
Aging shows you your folly, and, if things synch up on schedule, puts you in a frame of mind to gracefully accept this truth (that's what maturity is: realizing you're not a fabulous hero, but merely This Guy). Knowing the truth, it naturally follows that you'd take remedial steps to foolproof and error-check your imperfect self, the poor dear. Young people are revolted by remedial measures, which remind them of crutches and diapers. So they recoil in horror - ugh! - and go on to obliviously limp and shit all over the place.
This is the best view of how younger people look to older people: spoiled children perennially raging at the world for not hewing to their preferences.
This is a Web Search Landing Posting (WSLP) for the few dozen Apple Pay folks who try to pay via Apple Pay on the web and have problems because their orders are automatically given a garbled phone number (which is a problem when you buy something from Apple, because you can ONLY verify your order to Apple via the phone number associated with the order, unless you were logged in to your Apple account when you ordered).
Find your own contact card (i.e. search Contacts for your name) on your phone or computer. REMOVE THE "1-" PREFIX.
Go to Settings/Wallet. Delete the phone number. Reenter the number without the "1-" prefix. Make sure the phone number associated with Apple Pay is present (preferably top-most).
So if you're one of the few dozen people who've ordered from Apple via desktop Safari while not logged in, verifying your Apple Pay transaction on a phone with a leading "1-" before your own number, and noticed the resulting problem, you are now good. Please send me $2000 for the countless hours and ulcers I've saved you.
To everyone else:
1. The phone number you assign yourself in your Contacts app is significant, and SKIP THE LEADING "1-".
2. Never order from Apple (or anyone else) without being logged into your customer account. Associating an order after ordering is like swimming in a wave pool of bugginess.
Hell is being an edge case.
I just saw yet another friend complaining on Facebook about insomnia. That does it. I need to share some hard-won knowledge.
I've been a devoted yogi for nearly 50 years, having started out as a child prodigy. So I know a few things about consciousness and body processes. Sleep, in other words, is right in my wheelhouse.
I have extreme gastric reflux (I'm on the strong pills, and even they can't control it...though I'm not looking for advice....I've tried everything and am gradually losing weight, which is my best hope). Even mild reflux can keep you up at night, and if it wakes you up it's super hard to get back to sleep with what feels like a stomach full of gurgling fabric softener. If anyone can learn to sleep through this, it should be me. Yet I've struggled. Yup, even the 50-year yoga prodigy.
So I've been working on this for a while, applying deep skills to a hard problem. What I've learned can help you with the much easier problem of sleeping amid mere worries and stresses.
Note: you are stressed, even if you don't realize it. There are emotional connections to the other birds in one's flock, and this is a stressed and discombobulated world right now. So even if you feel calm and happy - as I do - you are nonetheless unavoidably affected by secondhand smoke.
Obvious countermeasures first, and then the tricky tricks:
Normalize Your Cycles
The body doesn't lead us. We lead it, and it aims to oblige, like an eager dog. If you snack or nap at 2:30pm three days in a row, on the fourth day you'll wonder why you're famished or exhausted at 2:30pm. Simple! So, for one example, your body doesn't crave sugar. It's that you've programmed it to expect sugar... and the body seems to demand what it's been programmed to expect. Cut the sugar, and it will reprogram within three days. Seriously.
Quarantine has us off our normal schedules. And the most common issue will be insomnia. So, even as unstructured as you may be, make a point to eat and sleep at exactly the same time every day. Then give yourself three days to accept the programming.
Exercise
The air does not sizzle with homicidal microbes. You can go outside. I know you've read about edge cases where viral clouds linger, or sneeze particles travel for yards, but what's theoretically possible isn't probable enough to concern yourself. Go outside, stay 6 (not 30) feet away from people, don't touch your face, and get yourself some sweating/heart-pumping exercise for at least 45 minutes at least 3-4x/week. Preferably daily especially if you're insomniac. If there's a hill nearby, great. Walk up it, over and over. Walking (fast and strong) is the ultimate statement of survival. You'll be amazed how good it feels.
Meditate
Your car's engine may race, but if you don't put it in gear, it can't drive anything. Same for the noise in your mind.
Whoever first told people they needed to learn to silence their mind was a sadistic bastard who's messed up generations. The thoughts can stay; you just need to recognize that this noise is not you. You are not the narration; the mental tickertape. Meditation opens some space between you and your noisy mind (I do this stripped down, super efficacious practice, plus this breathing practice, and I steer well clear of the rest of the web site) and each micron of additional separation is like creamy dreamy bliss.
With some space between thinker and thoughts - aka perspective - we remember that we're here to enjoy immersive entertainment. We never needed to carry the pain of the world around with us (for more on carrying burdens, read this, plus the articles linked at the bottom of that page).
Meditate and you'll never be more than a breath away from easily/comfortably abiding in the moment. It doesn't make you lazy. Do I seem lazy?
The Mechanics of Falling Asleep (the real yoga stuff)
Memorize this sequence, to be repeated every time you go to bed. But (important) don't think about it or practice it outside of bedtime. Reserve this and protect it.
Once you've lied down and turned out the light:
1. Un-smile your face
2. Droop into gravity. Then droop some more. Then recognize that you're hardly drooping at all. Contemplate how your body would have drooped if you were to wake up in this position, and droop that much. Emulate what your body's doing when you wake up. Don't obsess over this. Limit it to 10-20 seconds. Don't let it be an "activity", just bake it into your going-to-sleep protocol.
3. Add an imaginary 5 pounds to your head's weight, and let it drop squarely into your pillow. Notice how the pillow tenderly accepts the weight. Your pillow is there for you.
4. Let your thoughts drop into your pillow. Don't try to quiet or silence them, let them percolate, but simply let them drain down into the pillow (and from there, into the bed, the floor, and the earth). Notice the pillow's tender receptivity. It wants to suck out your thoughts. It's eager to do so. It's like a vacuum.
5. Briefly and lightly test yourself. Think something mildly stressful. Some task you need to do or some person you're mad at. When you see stress approaching a few hundred yards away, let it drain into your pillow. Again, do this "briefly and lightly". Don't turn it into an activity. Keep it under 10 seconds (5 seconds with practice). All of the above steps are doable in under 30 seconds, total. Do them rotely, like tooth brushing.
6. At this point, know that you ARE asleep! You only assume you're not out of pure skepticism. Let your skepticism, along with the other thoughts, drop down into the tenderly receptive pillow. The "I'm still awake/I can't sleep" thought is just another thought to drain into the pillow and into the earth. It's not some higher, special-case thought. You ARE asleep. All you need to do is let the skepticism gently drain.
If necessary, repeat the sequence. But don't expect that to be necessary, because, again, you ARE, at this point, asleep (the only problem is lingering skepticism). As a last resort, mentally intone your mantra (assuming you've been meditating, per suggestion above).
So there's a rare but worrisome possible side issue here: Stroke.
Sorry to be a downer, and bear in mind that these stories are rare edge cases. Folks aren't stroking out en masse. So I'm not trying to compound your sense of foreboding (if being sick is so awful to contemplate, shouldn't feeling good make you ecstatic?), but just to put you on alert:
If you experience sudden slurred speech, drooping on one side of the face, or confusion (more than normal), or a dead feeling in one arm, go ASAP to hospital. I know, I know; we're averse to that because they seem like viral cesspools. But 1. what you have is potentially worse, and 2. if you're under age 70, it's very likely virus-based, i.e. you've already got it. So go.
And remember that, as with cardiac symptoms, the clock is ticking. If you get help fast, you'll be okay. But seconds count.
Pass it on.
Pierre, our Technical Advisor, muses: "It may well just be that they're too strong to die of the other stuff. Time will tell."
Two observations, one mysterious, the other less so:
1. I ordered takeout online from an Indian restaurant largely serving immigrants. There was a field for "special instructions", so I wrote, naturally, "Spicy, please!" The food had not an iota of spice. Can you solve the mystery?
Here's my guess. No Indian would ever say "Spicy, please!". They'd simply expect proper spiciness. So by leaving this instruction, I was marking myself as a gringo. And gringos don't like spice.
2. Many extra-large grande condoms are slightly smaller than regular condoms.
I toured for several years with Illinois Jacquet, a big name to anyone over age 60 with any casual acquaintance with jazz, though he's scarcely remembered today. They say Jacquet died in 2004, but, not having viewed the body, I remain guarded.
Jazz stars of his era got nicknames. Lester Young was "Prez", Billie Holiday was "Lady Day", and Charlie Parker was "Bird". Jacquet, bestowed with something less upbeat, was known by everyone in the business (though never - my god - ever to his face) as "The Beast".
I took this photo of him, and was so delighted to have captured his true self that I somehow scraped together the cash to order a blown-up print:
Behold The Beast
Jacquet had vaulted to fame as a 19-year-old wunderkind in 1942 when he played the single most famous jazz solo of the first half of the twentieth century, a marathon-length tenor saxophone showcase on Lionel Hampton's mega hit "Flyin' Home".
For years, Jacquet was called to repeat the solo note-for-note, and he continued to do so decades after audiences were, shall we say, less feverishly demanding. When he picked up his horn, preparing to blow the world-renowned opening lick, his imagining of bright spotlight was so powerful that his face would actually illuminate.
40 years after his heyday, Jacquet repeated the same solos nightly on all the other songs in our repertoire, too. It was utterly mysterious to me, given that he was a master improvisor who could effortlessly produce a fine spontaneous solo. Finally, the guys in the band (which included legends like Cecil Payne, Eddie Barefield, and Richard Wyands) explained the situation with rolled eyes and helpless shrugs. Jacquet, I was told, was hoping those canned solos would become equally famous, treasured, and demanded if he repeated them enough. Like jazz solos might still become ubiquitous anthems in late-1980s America.
Show me someone angry enough to pick up a nickname like "The Beast" and I'll show you a mismatch between reality and self-image. Self-styled giants forced to endure the indignity of mere normalcy never go gentle into that good night. This is the most noxious form of immaturity.
Jacquet was not a bright man, but he had enormous cunning. The wheels were always spinning, making it devilishly hard to decipher his thinking. For example, he very rarely let me solo, though I always ignited the crowd (not boasting, it's just true). Over time, he backed me down to a mere 8 bars (about 15 seconds) per night, and I still managed to earn thunderous applause, to his undisguised annoyance. I might have sulked, but instead I viewed it as a fascinating psychological knot to unravel.
The obvious answer is that he didn't want to share limelight. Yet there were other musicians he went out of his way to feature, multiple times per night. It took years to map out his thinking, and here's the schematic:
A young black alto saxophonist, Jesse Davis, played lots of notes (and very well, too; he's still a deservedly popular player). Jacquet would let him unleash his technical prowess, then smugly hoist his own horn and waft out simple strokes of buttery soul, undercutting all that had preceded. The counterpoint worked for him. Show biz!
But a mystery remained. Joey, the band's white lead alto player, could waft out credible buttery soul, himself. So why was he featured several times a night, Jacquet screaming his name into the mic to whip audiences into a frenzy? It finally dawned on me. Jacquet needed a foil. Joey was like the Washington Generals - the Harlem Globetrotters’ perpetual opponents, urged by management to play their best to keep the stars on their toes and ensure a tight show. You need a second banana - a Mini Me - playing the same game for the presentation to have heft and structure. It was all dramatic narrative, all kayfabe.
I was just as young, just as white, and just as buttery/soulful, but Jacquet already had a white kid in that slot; he didn't need a second one. So while Joey blew his heart out, Jacquet would freeze his face in a camera-ready kabuki mask of faux pride and delight. And when I blew my heart out, he'd bear it with his back to the audience, showing his true face: that of a glowering, malevolent, dead-eyed old woman. Here, again, is that face:
It's well known that victims of abuse go on to abuse others, and that, indeed, had been Jacquet's origin story. His mentor/tormentor, Lionel Hampton (with whom I, ever hapless, also worked) had a public image as an elegant, dignified elder statesman, but musicians knew him as a ghoulish narcissist who literally could not stop playing so long as the crowd kept cheering. Sets would stretch for hours - venue owners begging him to get off the damned stage - while some remaining gaggle of drunks kept clapping to egg him on. Oh, and I will not be so foolish as to publicly discuss the truth (well known by jazz musicians) behind the untimely death of Hamp's wife. Ask a jazz musician in, like, 2080, when our progeny might consider it safe to finally share the tale with civilians.
But while Jacquet may have been The Beast, and Hampton may have been the Uber-Beast, Hampton's mentor/tormentor was one of the most evil bastards ever to stick a horn in his face. I'll offer my single favorite of many, many Benny Goodman stories passed down through the generations.
It was mid-January and the band was rehearsing in Goodman's palatial Manhattan townhouse. The thermostat was set somewhere in the 50's (Benny was a notorious miser), and the musicians were suffering. Suddenly Benny cut off the group mid-song and asked:
"Hey, fellas, is it just me or is it cold in here?"
The band replied, en masse (complete with chattering teeth and shaky voices) ala "Yeah, Benny, oh yeah, cold, yep, awful cold, Benny."
Benny strode wordlessly out of the room, returned in a sumptuous mink coat, and counted off the tempo.
Illinois was managed by a stern, austere woman named Carol whose ex-husband had been Woody Allen's original producer. She'd seized great gobs of money in the divorce, and used it to buy band uniforms and publicity for Jacquet, with whom she lived (we all assumed it was platonic) and whose playing she worshipped nearly as fervidly as her evil guru, Gurumayi
Chidvilasananda, who promised her and Jacquet eternal life so long as they kept the donations coming.
Jacquet was all for the "eternal life" thing, but less so the spirituality thing, so he continued boozing on the sly, hiding a profusion of glasses and flasks in the landscape around the bandstand (under the piano lid, in potted plants, etc), perennially out-foxing Carol, who tried to maintain her facade of elegant dignity while rooting around for these stashes like a truffle pig.
I could keep going. Endlessly (and, again, I did not view a body). But this must suffice for now. Sleep well, all.
Oh, here's my backstage pass from when we played the Pori Jazz Festival in Finland:
Forgot to note. Oddly, Jacquet really loved my name. He decided it had show-biz pizzazz. He loved to holler out both names at errant moments, like a Tourette’s tic: "JIM LEFF!"
Insight: People can be surprisingly awful and superficial and neurotic and dumb, etc.
Pitfall: People who've noticed this very often falsely assume that noticing means they're better. Sorry, no, it just means you're observant.
Common countermeasures: Contempt, disconnection, selfishness, condescension, disrespect, anger, bitterness, etc. I.e. typical human awfulness (the vicious circle personified).
Solution:Curiosity! Ponder: How did it happen? How does it look from inside their heads (i.e. their framing)? How am *I* awful? Can I view myself from a 30,000 foot view, with detachment? How can I help? How can I break the cycle? How can I "be the change"? What's proper conduct in a world where people willfully bring stress and suffering upon themselves (and, collaterally, others)?
I'm explaining why help seldom seems to arrive; why you often feel left high and dry; why the heavens appear to have forsaken you. It's because you insulate yourself from your desired result. You actively repel surprise via your boredom. You overlook serendipitous opportunity while obsessing over your sad stories. And you are absolutely rotten at spotting the magicians and angels delivered in response to your hopes and prayers.
None of this leaves me embittered. I've recognized a great big critical fact: god (or whatever you prefer to call the deepest frame of awareness; I certainly don't mean some supernatural guy up on a cloud) gets exactly the same treatment, so why would I expect better?
We humans shuffle through our blinkered existence, lost in mental drama, amid this gorgeous paradise planet, a miraculously lush sanctuary in a coldly inhospitable universe, blessed with trees (if trees had never existed and sprung up overnight, people would be driven insane by the beauty) and life-giving oxygen and sunshine and delicious food and refreshing water and all the immersive storylines we could dream of, all of it tailored to our every need (including our need for challenge, violence, and heartbreak) and permeated with heartbreaking love. Yet we scarcely notice. We're jaded, bored, and impatiently awaiting Something Better. We live in eternal anticipation - of our next big win, of momentary gratification, and of the arrival, finally, of "The Answer". We pray for help and then spurn the responders. We even actually have the gall to demand a messiah.
Yet not once have I heard a voice blasting down from the skies: "Attention ungrateful shitheads! How about taking a look at those trees for just like two seconds?" There's never a trace of whining about our endlessly oblivious lack of appreciation. God (or whatever) is like a stoic silent grandmother perpetually serving insanely delicious soup to ungrateful family members lost in fake mental drama who distractedly trudge out of the kitchen with nary a word or smile....yet she quietly feels deeply satisfied knowing that, at some level, they've been nourished.
As a centrist, I see the Right as the Left does, and vice versa. Temperamentally cooler and more pragmatic than either side (i.e. I roll my eyes an awful lot), I'm "for" institutionalism, incrementalism, and competence (here, fwiw, was my 2016 presidential platform).
With a foot in each camp, I'm well-positioned to explain one side to the other, and have done so in a series of postings labeled "Right Whispering".
The "Liberation” movement was 1. artificially contrived, funded, and whipped into A Thing, much like the Tea Party (see this invaluable short Twitter thread explaining the history of this move), and 2. a perfectly understandable framing issue on the part of those who are falling for it.
The second's more interesting to me.
I've previously explained the stalwart tough-guy credo of blue collar workers that made the guys working on the toxic, smoking WTC pile assume they'd be fine, and that made me confident I'd avoid hearing damage despite decades of aural abuse:
In the 80s and 90s I was (here’s video proof) one of the hardest-working musicians in New York City. I spent thousands upon thousands of hours laboring directly in front of screaming guitar amps, PA systems, and corn-fed trumpeters whose sense of self worth revolved around playing higher and louder than the human auditory system can tolerate. Unsurprisingly, mine couldn't.
I imagined I'd be ok; that I'd be an exception. Full-time professional musicians are essentially blue collar workers (though better trained than doctors or lawyers), and we have that familiar stoic toughness. I remember watching the guys toiling atop the smoking Trade Center pile after 9/11, all of them figuring that their tenacity, combined with the sacred nature of their mission, made them indestructible. Tough guys don't sweat fumes.
I was horror-struck by the tableau of inevitable cancer. Yet, in my own irrational tough guy pride, I kept returning to my position in front of guitar amps, PA systems, and brutish trumpeters, certain that I was exempt. After all, I performed miracles, screaming my head off on a difficult instrument for twelve hours at a stretch (often doubling or tripling up my gigs), maintaining high standards even while dead tired. I could tough it out through anything. As someone who could "get 'er done," I was like a Conway Twitty hero plowin' fields with his all-American John Deere slide trombone can I get a "hallelujah"?
Sure enough, I wound up, shmuck-like, with more than 50% hearing loss.
So I've been there. I've done the same move these "liberationists" are doing right now. And maybe I can help you see them in a different light.
A certain type of person keeps watching the tender/delicate classes set their hair on fire over this and that. It seems like a nonstop series of hysterical wolf-cryings. That's why they tend not to evacuate for hurricanes, or hew to health fads, or read the label, or chew each bite 35 times. One type of person is innately complacent; the other innately alarmed. Neither is more irrational; both just keep digging in,overreacting to the evident daffiness of the other side. Such is life in a binary society.
Each has a framing, and they're as incompatible as Betamax and VHS. But the thing to remember is that while people with different framings appear to be in completely different movies (making their actions hard to fathom), in their heads - i.e. from their perspective - it all makes sense.
No one framing works for all scenarios, though we cling desperately to the familiar perspective composing our comfort zone and identity. In extreme circumstances, our misplaced clinging becomes dangerous or even fatal (that's why a lithe perspective is essential). Consider the WTC recovery workers who held on to their framing far too stubbornly. And consider yourself, deeming those guys heroes and the anti-quarantine liberators rabid fools when both operated from the same stalwart get-er-done no-nonsense framing. This disjoint demonstrates that your framing, too, fails to serve all purposes in all contexts. We all fall prey to this, more often than we like to admit. The music stops and we're suddenly chairless.
If you imagine you've never clung to a perspective past the point where it stopped fitting circumstance (making you seem, to external observers, out of your damned mind), then you haven't paid much attention. And this blinkered inflexibility reflects a perspective every bit as frozen as that of these poor "liberation" schlubs.
I wrote this Quora answer some time ago. It never caught fire like my near-viral reply to "How do I tell if somebody is intelligent?", and it's a bit half-baked and bumpy, like many of my efforts to explain counterintuitive, nuanced things in short form (Quora's even harder, because I can't use a zillion links to explain sub-issues). But I'm republishing it here 'cuz it's timely.
I am in my late 20s and feel I have wasted a lot of time. Is it too late for me to achieve something worthwhile?
You can't waste time. You can only fail to match some imagined standard. Trying to make reality match up with imaginary standards is the way human beings make themselves miserable. It's also delusional, because only reality is real. When reality itself - how it is, right here and right now - isn't your standard, you're in big trouble. Look around you! Here you are! That sense of inhabitation (i.e. your aliveness, i.e. reality) will be exactly the same whatever becomes of you. It's always the same guy/gal looking out your eyes it's always been, no?
Your free will is in the moment; what you choose to do right now. You can't make yourself rich, or thin, or famous; those are the culmination of myriad factors, and we make one decision at a time. You may choose not to waste this money in your hand, not to eat these potato chips right here, and not to be staring vacantly into your iPad right this moment. You maneuver the boat with the tiniest momentary proddings.
And that's why success usually comes later. Proddings aggregate OVER TIME, and that takes a while (unless you're lucky and/or something extraordinary's going on). Thats' why your 60-ish uncles drive nicer cars.
These momentary proddings are all you've got. It's what you do right NOW. One choice, for example, would be to engage in endless rumination and self-conscious self-measurement. This stock-taking, worth-measuring wide-lens movie view of your life is a fake-out. It's not real; there's no such thing. You're not in a story. You're right HERE.
Even if you were a billionaire Nobel Prize winner, your life would still be experienced as "right here" - in your momentary decision-making. And that's how you get there - by inhabiting the moment rather than gauging your performance. People who do great things don't spend their moments feeling super-marvelous about their accomplishments. That's as useful and appealing as smelling your own farts. Rather, they spend their moments making choices, micro-navigating the boat with glee. That's how they got there in the first place! The desire to see yourself as super-marvelous stems from the big-view abstraction of your life, which is a fake-out and from which nothing real ever happens.
It's a fool's errand to try to accomplish worthwhile things in order to feel accomplished and worthwhile. That's not how it works. It's about experiencing a burning desire to do something very specific, and so enticing that your momentary decision-making falls, over time, into synchronization with what's needed for that thing to really happen. It's all about the doing of the thing, not the "wanting-to-be-able-to-say-you're-someone-who's-done-the-thing" thing, which is the most weak-ass thing there is.
Consider: Most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing. And that's why most singers are so awful.
tl;dr version: simply do what draws your passion and stop gauging your own progress.
I'm going through old boxes. The image below is from about age 7. That's when I was sending myself postcards forward in time to myself, and had started to realize that I was approaching my peak and would need to opt out of being switched out by elder personas.
People discard their childhood persona as they mature because they recognize the limitations. Having grown beyond that persona, they cast it aside, graduating to bigger and better things. But what if you were an amazing, wise 11 year old?
That's when I peaked! That kid seemed awesome, so I've never seen any reason to switch him out. In fact, I've spent my life scrambling to reclaim even a fraction of my 11-year-old self's clarity, open-heartedness, and intelligence.
