Water Under the Bridge

You always hear the maxim "Remember the Present." It's an entreaty to all of us to enjoy life as it occurs, rather than being mired in past occurrences or the overzealous pursuit of the future. I guess the sentiment is nice, this notion that life should be enjoyed in an immediate, spontaneous manner, that we should dwell on this earth independent of the expansive time lines continuously unraveling in our minds. But there's something scary about giving oneself over to the present. For people such as myself, who are dominated by a profound sense of personal history, the present will forever exist receding into the past, like so much flotsam drifting out to sea.

I am the kind of person who finds succor in nostalgia. I even wrote my Common Application Essay for college as a reflective inventory of dusty, old keepsakes I stow away beneath my bed back home. As I go about my daily life, I assess the quality of my experiences in the context of my past. The frozen yogurt I enthusiastically ingested today at lunch is pitted against the memory of waffle cone Wednesdays my junior year of high school and the kitschy delight of splitting a parfait with an old crush after a track meet. I walk along Harvard's shady pathways and images from my past cluster at the edge of my consciousness. Crossing under Annenberg's triumphant flying buttresses, I see Princeton's venerable chapel with its vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows, and as I run along the Charles River I'm reminded of a similar run two years ago, along the swampy edges of Stanford's Lake Lagunita.

My past makes me question the present. I track in my mind the ghostly progression of lives that could have been mine, veins of experience that will now never be plumbed. The past makes me doubt, makes me wonder at my circumstances, makes me quibble over trivialities of place and time. Sometimes I feel like all I am is a moving memory. After all, how I perceive the present is largely based on how memorable I feel it to be. I'm always asking this question of myself: Will I remember this? Will this matter to me in a year, a decade, a lifetime?

This isn't to say that I don't enjoy my life. On the contrary, I tackle each new day with a fierce tenacity, and I try not to live in the past; even though sometimes I fail. In my mind, the present is enriched by the past. It's an indirect process, but it happens, and my life is certainly the better for it.

Just yesterday I was standing on a bridge over the Charles, looking impassively down at the water below. It was a moment of smiles and laughter and ballsy bravado. My world felt open and new. I stood there, perched just so, with some new Harvard friends at my back and Boston thrumming all about me. My present condition was very apparent to me. Yet all the colliding sights and sounds could not crowd out my past. Memory laced the air I breathed as I jumped. Memory fleshed out my particular sensation of weightlessness, the sense of impending impact with the water. And memory articulated the refreshing chill of the water--how the river eddied and undulated as I swam back towards shore.

I walked away from the bridge knowing I had made another memory, whose relative importance to my life story would reveal itself as time passed and the present evaporated into a mist of remembrance.