Time’s Subjects

“What happens to us in the future? Do we become assholes or something?”
– Marty McFly, “Back To The Future” (1985)

You know, looking back from nearly the age of flying DeLoreans, rejuvenation clinics, hoverboards and abolished lawyers, the distant past of the mid-1980s in some ways seems a touch more real than the society of confused ambiguities that we all inhabit in 2012. Some of that is age, I’m sure. At 40, you appreciate the spins and twists and muddled middles of life considerably more than you do at 15, or even 30. You learn to fight them less. You start learning to let go. At some point you realize that what you cling to the most are often little more than convenient fictions.

When I was much younger, probably my favorite film of all time was Back To The Future. It still is one of my very favorites, though I appreciate it on different levels than I did then. What I didn’t get back when I was Marty McFly myself was how dark of a story it really is.

Think about it. You got a kid who, while not living a particularly perfect life, could be doing a lot worse. He’s not much different from any other average lower-middle-class teenager living in low rent 1980’s burbs; he’s not living in the house he’d like, or has the car he’d like (or any car, for that matter), or has the family circumstances that he’d like. What teenager does? Most of what he knows and accepts about reality – indeed, about himself and where he comes from – has been drawn carefully from a depressing parental narrative that he’s never had reason nor opportunity to seriously question.

He then gets the opportunity to throw 1.21 gigawatts into the equation and see the truth of things for himself. In the process, he discovers that virtually everything he’d been told and led to believe about the roots of his life is a convenient fiction. A lie, even. And as he continues to unravel the 1985 he knows, he himself begins to unravel, fading into unreality as revelation and roles dissolve into a lukewarm ambiguous mess.

Of course, the movie ends with our hero able to profoundly “fix” what was broken, returning home to a new and improved 1985 in which the life he always wanted – always knew should have been – was waiting patiently for him.

Real life doesn’t quite work like a Hollywood soundstage. In life, we often leave the fictional narratives alone – even construct them yet more elaborately, with accumulated twists and turns to keep the plot moving – and find new reasons to continue celebrating things that were never true to begin with. And I suppose, as with Marty McFly, that’s the dream: to replace the fractured, damaged life that is with a better version that has just a few twists and adjustments. A second draft, as it were.

Isn’t a do over what we all want?

But of course that’s the catch. No one really gets a do over, a truly clean slate, a brand new fresh start. You can go live on an island if you really want. You can make up a whole new past, sever all ties, build your statues of self and set off into the jungles of the New World in search of the lost city of gold. Cast off your chains and declare yourself king in a distant country without memory. It’s been done before, and it’ll be done again.

It doesn’t work, however. As Shakespeare once wrote, we are all Time’s subjects. And eventually, once you’re done playing on your little island and finished acting out your little self-created dramas, Time is still waiting for you in patient mockery. You may have forgotten about it, but it hasn’t forgotten about you.

And that’s okay. It really is. Because honestly, how truly fulfilling is it really as an adult to spend your days trapped in your own narratives – especially if, deep down, you’ve always known that they weren’t true?

Yes, the narrative was comforting, even if also painful. It brought sense to the world, put things in an understandable framework that lets you put little sticky notes on things that say “bad”, “good”, “broken” and “fuck you”, trimming back the number of things you still have yet to figure out. And when that thin layer of fiction falls, what’s left behind is a stark reality: that nothing ever truly made sense, not really.

So do you make a few more twists and turns, hop back into the DeLorean and zip back to 1985, content in your new Life 2.0? Or is there a better way? One that doesn’t simply replace one elaborately constructed melodrama with another one?

Are you willing to stand before your master Time, in the blazing light of What Is, regardless of what that ultimately means or how it changes you – and be okay with it? At what point do you stop having stuff to prove? When can you just let it go, let the chips fall where they may, and begin the hard work of bending down and picking them back up and fixing what has been broken for far too long?

It’s been a week of reflection around here. A good week. In many ways, a week of joyful celebration. But also a week salted a bit with melancholy and somber regret, and even a little mourning I guess, as the end of a very, very long journey is coming into view. The task now is to figure out where things go from here, what happens next, without the comforting yet painful abrasion of this particular narrative armor driving the usual characters along the same old familiar tracks.

There’s no need to rush back to the future, because there’s no longer any need to escape from the past. What is, is. And I look forward to the unseen and uncertain path that stretches out before us today – with a touch of hope, looking up, and with a willingness to embrace warmly what good we find.

Hollywood endings optional.