If my future self could send me one sentence, I suppose I should use the opportunity wisely. After all, this is essentially time travel with a strict word limit, so naturally my first thoughts are practical: Buy Apple. Don’t eat the gas-station sushi. The Phillies finally won another World Series. Whatever you do, don’t open that bottle. It’s worth $4,000 now.
All useful information, of course. But if I only get one sentence, I probably shouldn’t waste it on baseball, bourbon or investment advice. And really, I don’t think I’d want my future self to tell me exactly what happens anyway. I wouldn’t want to know every victory in advance, and I certainly wouldn’t want advance notice of every disappointment. There are probably some things we’re better off discovering one day at a time.
What I’d really want is reassurance, but not the greeting-card kind. I wouldn’t want some generic message telling me that everything is going to be fine, because life has taught me enough by now to know that everything is not always fine. People we love die. Plans collapse. Relationships change. Jobs disappoint us. Dreams sometimes take far longer than we expected, and some of them never happen at all. What I’d want to know is whether I was right to keep going.
I’m 59 years old, and there are still things I want from this life. I still want to write books people want to read. I still want to see whether something I’ve written can become more than a manuscript sitting on a computer or a box on a shelf. I want writing to become a bigger part of whatever comes next for me, and I want to know that the thousands upon thousands of words I’ve written over the years weren’t simply me talking into an empty room.
I want more time with my family. I want to watch my grandchildren grow up and see the people they become. I want to be around long enough for them to have stories about Papi that make everybody else at the Thanksgiving table roll their eyes. Preferably good stories. Mostly good stories.
I want my marriage to keep growing. I want to laugh more. I want to worry less about whether I was chosen, included, recognized or approved of by everybody else. And I want to believe that, even at this point in life, there are still some surprises left. Good ones.
When you reach a certain age, there’s a temptation to start looking backward more than forward. You notice how quickly the years piled up. You remember the opportunities you missed, the mistakes you made and the roads you didn’t take. And every now and then a quiet question slips into your head: Did I miss my chance?
Maybe that’s the question I’d really be sending into the future. Not whether everything worked out exactly the way I wanted. Not whether I finally became successful. Not even whether I made enough money. I’d just want to know whether there was still something ahead of me worth walking toward.
So if some older version of me could somehow reach backward through the years and send one sentence to the guy sitting here writing this today, I think I know what I’d hope to see:
Keep going. You didn’t waste your life, and the best part wasn’t behind you.
