I bought a grownup desk. I was told it's poplar; my favorite tree species second to ginkgo. I placed the desk between two south-facing windows of my second-story bedroom, a large area that had previously been more or less bare. In the spring and summer the windows overlook a small wooded area separating my lot from the next. In these months the sun washes my bed and hardwood floor in a soft, dust-speckled light, and casts shifting, diffuse shadows of the trees outside. Paused in the center of my room, I’ll often reel as images of similar light-drenched afternoons from my youth and adolescence coalesce into an eddy of lucid, fleeting reveries. Then it’s time for a nap.

I spoke with someone today who pointed out something I wish I would have pointed out, saturated as I am with profound advice on living. Within Western culture is a tacit belief that the past is fixed and not worth worrying about. How many times do we hear, “what’s done is done”, or some variation thereof? This person’s proposal was that the past is hugely malleable, and that its intelligent contemplation can be very useful. I’ll paraphrase their argument:

As we go about our days, bits and pieces of our experiences stick in our heads. This is fortunate since a continuous autobiographical memory is required to maintain our sense of self. But still, most of us retain only small snippets of our experiences. Naturally, we string these morsels together and declare our knowledge of what “happened”. Rarely do we appreciate how minute a subset of our experiences our memories actually contain, or recognize our habit of defining the past with respect to ourselves. For example, we refer to periods of time as “rough”, or “blissful”. What we mean, of course, is that they were rough or blissful for us. So the manner in which we describe or reflect upon our experiences says everything about ourselves and nothing about time. Maybe the past is worth thinking about, after all. Except when you’re drunk. That’s stupid.