High Five From Myself

I sometimes receive high fives from past versions of myself when I feel like I'm doing something that a younger version of myself would think is cool.

Bending the space-time continuum to ensure that present versions of myself feel adequately psyched up is a challenging exercise, but one always worth the effort. I should explain.

As a young man I made the decision to supply future versions of myself with mementos of my brilliance. It was, at first, difficult to discern the most effective way to do this. I'm not very photogenic, so pictures of myself giving me a thumbs up would have been more mortifying than encouraging. I never really understood the mail system, so mailing myself letters of encouraging would have been very challenging. Even if I had been psychic the fact that Canada Post can't find my address to save their damn lives (I live at a 1/2 address...in unit A) would have a Back to the Future-esque letter to future me completely inconceivable.

Hence my decision to send forward high fives..the most righteous of fives.

Awesome pun? High five

To better explain how this works, if I did something awesome and unexpected as a younger man...for example, managing to speak to a girl without sweating too much on my palms and saying something extremely stupid and mildly offensive I would send myself a high five. Scored the game winning basket? Send myself  a high five. Scored perfect on a test? Send myself a high five. Go on a swing-set without getting so nauseous that I puke? You get the idea.

A particularly good "Your Mom" joke... high five

While all of those examples seem rather pedestrian (minus the girls one...did I ever mention how bad I was with girls?) the sum of the events that shaped your late childhood and adolescence add up to a pretty decent stable of high fiveable moments.

Why did this matter? Why do the delusions of a pretty weird little kid still translate into an ego boost for a 21 year old, soon to be graduate and real human? Partially because I'm now a deluded 21 year old rather than a deluded child...but also because receiving high fives from a less complicated version of yourself is, actually, a genuine pick me up.

I didn't think this through when I was a child, but looking back on it as a (slightly) wiser young man I think that acting in a way that younger you would be proud of is actually pretty cool. If I am being entirely frank, most of the time I like the younger version of myself more than I like the current version of myself. He may have been a bit rounder, completely incapable of playing sports, lacking all ambition that didn't involve the high score on a video game and completely incapable of communicating with children his own age but he was still a pretty legit character.

The younger version of myself tended to call things how it was. He went out of his way to do things that were nice (most of the time) because that was what the good people in the cartoons taught him to do. He also treated absolutely every person with the kind of respect they deserved without having to prompt himself. He rarely, if ever, made pre-judgments of the people around him and accepted absolutely anybody and everybody as a friend. (Maybe he did that last one because he was in sorry need of more friends, so not quite as legit.)

I say that because life is like this. 

I'm watching a lot of my friends post about their graduation this week, and have had a lot of chats with them about how they think going out and being a real person is going to be. My impression from those conversations is that being a real person is tough. It takes a lot out of you to be a responsible and functioning individual in a society where banks are out to screw you for the rest of your life because you looked at them funny and the only people that know you in the city you have to relocate too because that was the only place that offered a job is the student loan representative that is half-threatening to break your knees with a bat. These challenges can wear people down physically, emotionally, and morally, and it can sometimes be cool to look back at a younger version of yourself, even if they were covered in goobers, and receive a high five that tells you that things are going alright.

I think the best feeling in the world would be to know that a younger version of myself would look up to me and think I was cool. I'm starting, however preliminarily, to look at the rest of my life. I'm frantically trying to make connections, foster closer relationships, evaluate where I want to be, what I want to be doing, who I want around me. When I'm doing this, it is sometimes helpful to remember that the people I used to look up to when I was a pretentious, snotty, little 8 year-old were all going through something similar and managed to carry themselves, not only with grace and respect, but in a way that I thought was unbelievably cool.

It helps me to believe that I might be doing the same thing, however imperfectly, and that is why I covet those high fives from a younger, stickier, stupider, but much more together version of myself.

/endpreaching