Notes to my younger self (and a Baz Luhrmann hit in the nineties)

Many of us have been considering of late big tech and social media giant Facebook… it’s many evils and misuses for bad deeds and the misinformation plague it helps to spread. The Social Dilemma was pretty confronting, even if it didn’t tell us stuff we didn’t already know on some level.

That is by way of disclaimer before I share something I once shared on FB, and cognisant of the fact I would not have been reminded of it were it not for FB’s ‘Memories’ feature.

On this day, 6 years ago, I shared some thoughts and reflections on Big Philosophical Life Questions for a friend’s project, framed as advice to my younger self.

It’s one of those rare examples of a post written by past me I’m comfortable sharing in it’s original state, unedited, unchanged.

In words made famous by Baz Luhrmann on The Sunscreen Song, “I will dispense this advice now”.

1986

Not only was I born in this great year, and the song ‘Livin’ On A Prayer’ by Bon Jovi was released, it was also the year a woman called Mary Oliver wrote a poem. She titled it ‘The Journey’, and Clare Bowditch sent her subscribers an email today with this poem attached. It spoke to me. I hope it speaks to you too.  

Daily inspiration for saving my own life: my blood, my sister, my friend.

  One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice — though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do — determined to save the only life you could save.