A brief encounter with another self

IWAS introduced to a well-known media personality during the week. It was just a friend of a friend at an event kind of thing. “You haven’t met before?” asked our mutual acquaintance. “I don’t think so,” said the personality. And it was fair enough, he must have met tens of thousands of people over the years.

But we had met before, back in the 1990s, when I had been on his show to discuss something I had written. I didn’t mention it partly because of the quarter-century factor, partly because the conversation was about something else and partly because the me who met him then feels so unlike me now that it seemed accurate to say no, we haven’t met before.

I think I was only working that last part out the next day when I had coffee with a friend. We met when our now men sons were boys, well over a decade ago, and for both of us a lot has changed. She had a dream back then that she felt powerless to enact but step by step she has made that dream real. I too have changed some of the things that irked me back then.

Perhaps, because it has been a process rather than a sudden jump, because neither of us has finished yet and because we’re a bit prone to self-flagellation, we don’t fully appreciate just how far we have come in a decade. But the previous evening’s encounter with the ghost of Me Past made me inclined to suggest these should be celebratory scones, not just common or garden ones.

It’s all too easy to see what is left to be done, to focus on the unachieved, the failures. But sometimes it’s good to look back to see just how far you have come, to focus on progress and success, and to use that to fuel the fire for further change.