Why is it that, when I catch my mother’s face looking back at me in a passing window reflection, I am filled with a sense of completion, oneness, and calm? While I fully promote (and paraphrase) Woody Allen’s famous “Annie Hall” quip about relationships – “life is like a shark, it has to constantly move forward or it sinks” – for me, moving forward increasingly means turning back. I define my sense of self by the extent to which I feel true to the “original” version of me.
So, at 44 years old, I bought a horse and re-connected to the amazing feeling of being gently lifted over a jump. I joined a dance class and fell back to my default of claiming the right-hand corner of the first row. I sought out music that filled my childhood home. “What’s this all about Alfie?” (Yeah, yeah, old films and soundtracks, too.) Is there something about the desire to return to that which we once knew and loved that is more than just nostalgia? Is it possible that the earlier versions of who we are and how we conceive of ourselves are somehow truer? Or, is it just the fear of aging, through which the younger self eclipses the older?
Rabbi Soloveitchik instructs us in the power of the “lonely” self who is uninhibited by the habits of the “social being (who) is superficial (and who) imitates and emulates.” He states that the “lonely man is free.” Perhaps, as long as life’s journey seems committed to the unpredictable – in both the worst and the best ways – the allure of the younger, untainted self is the search for the predictable and the dependable: the core of each of us which we readily recognize and the peace that this brings.
As the prophet Isaiah urges, “In returning to still and rest you will be saved, in quiet and in confidence shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15).
