When I retired from my job as a staff pastor in 2020, my plan was to jump headlong into the pursuit of the writing life. This was not a new venture for me–I have pursued writing since I was in high school, when I worked on the school newspaper and made the decision to study journalism in college. My interest was not strictly in print journalism, but rather in radio, television and film. Every job I have ever had since college (none of them in radio, television, or film, as it turns out) has involved writing at some level, and in fact, for a time my main job was technical writing. Writing has been in my bloodstream for nearly my whole life, and the vocation of a writer often involves spending time thinking about both past and future.
A few years before I retired I participated in a writing workshop in which my main project was a spiritual memoir. Though that project has since been supplanted by other writing projects and interests, I have written thousands of words recounting everything I can recall about my childhood and early life, largely as an exercise in writing and editing, and in order to further develop writer’s habits and disciplines. I have, therefore, necessarily spent a tremendous amount of that time thinking about the past, and my past, in particular. The act of writing things down has also dredged long-forgotten memories from the silted river of my life, and as a side-effect, I have begun working on family history and genealogy. Moving in that world brought me to another project, a biography of a certain person in Kansas history–someone who died a very long time ago, someone who lived a significant life, someone I feel should be remembered.
So I offer the above as proof of my substantial and ongoing thoughts of the past.
At the same time, my interests in life go far beyond writing memoir and history. I have a long list of projects to make in my wood shop. I have an even longer list of projects I am hoping to build at my electronics workbench. I have two musical instruments that I play reasonably well, but I desire to continue to improve my skills on them, and I own at least five other instruments that I play very minimally or not at all, which I intend to learn. I have five grandchildren who are all under the age of fourteen at the moment, and I am keenly interested in spending time with them, creating future memories with them, and watching them grow up and chart the courses of their lives. I think often of what the future will be like as my wife and I continue to age, and I confess I worry about what might happen to her life if dementia takes my mind and health as it did my mother’s and grandmother’s. And I have a very tall stack of interesting books that won’t read themselves–I need to continue to read and study and think and write…so, yes, I spend a great deal of time thinking about the future as well.
The past is instructive, and can often help explain how things got to be the way they are now. (Oh, how I wish I had studied history more in school.) The future doesn’t yet exist, but I am energized (and perhaps a little bit terrified) by the possibilities, and by the urgency that comes from the realization that one’s time in this life is limited.
So the answer to the first question posed above is “yes.” And I think the why is obvious.
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(Posted in response to 1/5/2024 prompt)
doug heacock: words 