October and Everything After
Every Autumn I’m touched by the same memory, indelibly pressed to my being by repetition. I’m walking across the field toward my high school in the crisp early October morning and I’m struck by how golden the field glows at 7:25 am and the sense of belonging I feel. I’m alone aside from my shadow, deaf to the sounds outside my headphones, as the recordings of Bruce Springsteen, Counting Crows, and David Bowie flow through my ears.
About here is where I should note that school started promptly at 7:19 and I was only walking across this golden field of solitude and kick-ass tunes because I was (and in a lot of ways still am) a perpetually-late individual. I know it’s a terrible trait, I know it conveys that I have no respect for the time of others, I know that’s entirely under my control and I just need to get my shit together, I know, I know, I know, I know… but you know what? Those few times in life I’m waiting on someone else and they hit traffic or don’t hear their alarm, or need 15-20 extra minutes to get somewhere? I’m a paragon of grace and forgiveness. But, I digress…
This memory always comes back to me around the same time each year because I believe many of us who attended school have come to view September as a transitionary period and October/November as the time of year you should be hitting your stride, thinking seriously about what you want out of the upcoming year, and moving more confidently in the direction of your future.
Then, somewhere down the line, time shifts away from the patterns you’ve always known and suddenly you’re smack-dab in your adult life. People stop asking you what you’d like to be doing in ten years and start asking you what you’d tell your seventeen-year-old self if you could offer that kid you barely recognize some advice for the future. It’d be so tempting to say, “don’t take that internship,” or, “don’t worry about breaking up with so-and-so,” or, “2015 will be a weird year… just a heads up.” The caveat here is that, at seventeen, you (or in this case me) couldn’t tell me shit. I was never so confident in that what I knew as I was at seventeen and, God willing, I never will be again. But there is a little bit of advice I think I’d take from my memory of my former self:
Hold on to the golden moments with both hands.
I don’t mean “golden” as in “good,” - I mean golden as is the turning of seasons, both literal and metaphorical. The moments that fill your senses with the certainty that things are going to fall away and change so that new growth can take place in the future. The moments that serve as unavoidable reminders that the lush of Sping will give way to the droughts and sunshine of Summer, all to be laid dormant by Winter’s bony hand, but not before the landscape sparkles in transition before and behind you. All things gilded by fate or choice will be illuminated in those moments, ready to be acknowledged and admired before passing into the next phase of development.
To my seventeen-year-old self, I’d advise to link as many seemingly mundane experiences as possible to a classic rock playlist. Styx’s seminal masterpiece ‘Fooling Yourself’ is capable of bringing you back to the golden moments crystallized in your mind - you won’t know that until many years later. You’ll also come to associate Springsteen’s ‘The Rising’ and ‘Atlantic City’ with moments of clarity and connection that run deeper than the lyrics. And don’t even get me started on ‘A Long December,’ seriously. You’re building the backing soundtrack to your life and, while it might feel passive, its pull to both past and future will allow you to glimpse the infinite, if only for a moment in time. That moment in time, for me, will always be when the world lights up in the bonfire of Autumn and I feel like I’m running late for my own future. It’s there that I can find certainty that as long as I’m moving forward, my direction and pace will find me in due time*.
*Not my teachers, though… They found me trying to sneak into class a solid fifteen minutes after morning announcements.