Navigational Advice for My Younger Self

Navigational Advice for My Younger Self

It is true that there are
tolls at every offramp.
You could make this a reason
to cruise control ahead,

but your fuel can’t hold forever,
your car won’t run forever,
and these miles of asphalt
are a lonely place
to take up walking.  

Photo by Kristaps Ungurs (Unsplash)

The Prompt

I really can’t tell you how the above poem came about. It was one of those mysterious floods of words—one second, I was thinking about nothing in particular (at least as far as I can recall), and the next second, there was this poem, fully formed. Does that happen to you? How do you make sense of it? And when you have the opposite experience, when words tuck into corners and refuse to come out, what’s your method for coaxing them?

For today’s prompt, I invite you to consider what advice you would offer to your younger self. This could be your 5 decades ago self, your 5 years ago self, or hey, even your 5 minutes ago self. (“Dear younger-by-5-minutes Self, you really don’t need that second cup of coffee.")

Being human and all, perhaps you have made one or two questionable career choices? Relationship choices? Hairstyling choices? Fashion choices? Real estate choices? Maybe you floundered for years as a Puppet Arts Major when really your passion was in Fermentation Science. Maybe you’ve said something you wish you could take back. Maybe you once neglected to say something that you now wish you had screamed from the rooftops.

I’ve got one rule for you, friends (sorry to be so bossy!), and it may be a tough one: please engage in this exercise with a spirit of friendliness. We aren’t here to bash our past selves. Let’s approach them with a dollop of curiosity and a wallop of compassion. We were all younger and dumber at some point in our lives than we are at present. And in other respects, we were likely also younger and wiser.

If in going back across your life you find yourself admiring the wisdom of your younger self—the ingenuity and resourcefulness with which you survived situations beyond your years, for example—then feel free to play with flipping this prompt on your head. Does your younger self want to offer some sage bits of advice to your today self?

As you sit in the swirl of memory, curiosity, regret, nostalgia, compassion, and hard-won wisdom, find the poem that wants to come to the page. Maybe it’s direct advice to yourself. Or maybe it isn’t—maybe something totally different grows from the seed of this prompt. In either case, I look forward to reading it!

P.S. I’m out of town at the moment and don’t have access to pictures of my much younger self. But if you’re a real life friend or family member who has a fully clothed but suitably humiliating picture of my past self (say 10+ years ago) that you think I should have used in this post (in lieu of the highway photo), feel free to share it in the chat!