It’s great to visit Memory Lane, but it’s fatal to try to live there

By David McElroy · July 20, 2019

I took a shortcut Friday afternoon from my office to my barber shop that took me through an industrial area where I used to spend a lot of time.

I hadn’t been on that part of Oxmoor Road in Homewood for about 15 years. Several of the printing companies I used to deal with — when I was a political consultant — are located in the area, so I was flooded with memories of late-night visits to do press-checks on mail pieces for my clients.

I printed dozens of jobs at Craftsman Printing right over there. Across from them was the old building where PressTech used to be before the owner — a man who did me more favors than I can count — unexpectedly killed himself on the press floor late one night.

My memory was flooded with faces and images and sensations of my time in the area. Part of me enjoyed the sweetly bitter sensation of experiencing a past which is now dead, but another part of me wanted to leave the area and never return. And then I had a sudden thought.

Memory Lane is a one-way street — and it’s a dead end.

I’ve reinvented myself half a dozen times during my career. I never planned such a path, but it has seemed entirely natural to me. I’ve been thinking about this for the last day — and I realize that every time I reinvent myself, I cut ties to who I’ve been and where I’ve been — and I leave that past behind.

Every time I start over, I have to cut my past off. I didn’t quite realize that until now. Most people seem to build a new stage of their lives on the framework of their previous stage, but I do it differently.

I sail a ship to a new place — metaphorically speaking — and then I burn the ship so that I have no way of going back.

As I’ve thought about this today, I’ve tried to think about reconnecting with places and people from my past — and the thought almost makes me shudder. I’m not angry with people from the past. I don’t have anything against the places I’ve been part of. But I’m so focused on where I’m going that memories of the past seem almost like burdens.

I don’t go to high school or college reunions. I’ve mentioned this before. I have no objection to the idea of reunions and I’m not angry with anybody from the past. They just don’t seem relevant to where I’m going.

I don’t spend a lot of time reminiscing with people I’ve worked with in the past. I know a lot of people who do that. Many of them are so full of memories that they spend their careers trying to recreate some fabled time from their youth. But nothing about the past is relevant to what I want to do now.

I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago or 20 years ago. The core part of me is the same. My values are the same. But I’ve shed a lot of masks and costumes which I used to hide behind. I’ve left behind a lot of things which don’t seem to matter anymore.

It sometimes surprises me to notice what I was reading, listening to and thinking about just 10 years ago. The changes in me have been very gradual, but the end result is that I’m very different from the person I used to be.

I have a lot of respect for my past. I would like to be able to take my future wife to places from my past and show her where I was shaped and what I did in those places. I’d like to take her to the newsroom of a small daily newspaper and say, “This is where I sat when I edited stories every day. This is where we put the pages together. This is where I checked the papers coming off the press.”

I’d like to do that with a number of places. I’d like to take her to the campus of the University of Alabama and show her where I had classes, where I used to station myself to watch people, where specific things that mattered happened to me.

I’d like for her to take me to the places the matter to her. I’d like to visit her hometown and her high school and her college and all the places that helped shape who she is.

Understanding the past — for yourself and your partner — can be very important to understanding how the present came about. But living there will make you stagnant. It will prevent you from moving forward.

I’m in a dynamic period right now when I’m thrashing about in an attempt to reinvent myself again. I don’t know exactly where it will be or who I’ll be with or what I’ll be doing. I have some clues, but I don’t know for sure.

Whatever it is, I know I will leave the dead past behind — where it belongs. My eyes are on the future and another reinvention. That’s where the excitement of life is, not in the past.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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