There’s a large, rather unattractive-looking grayish plastic bowl that I use almost exclusively for my lunchtime salad.
It is a good bowl because it fits the bagged salads I eat and all of the bits of extra stuff I pull out of the fridge to jeuje it up. And when I mix in the dressing, it will contain the salad with minimal spillage – any of which is due to my clumsy overexuberance.
The bowl has become mine despite it belonging to my girlfriend, and I only learned of its existence after I moved in with her.
I was cleaning out this gray beauty last week when I had an idea about something to write. You may have read it. I wrote that piece right after I dried off my salad bowl and placed it back in the cupboard.
You see, it is important to put the fully dried bowl directly back in the cupboard first before writing because the aforementioned girlfriend hated it when I left the slightly less than fully dried bowl on the ‘drink’s station’ above its home for it to air dry.
She began showing her displeasure in that arrangement by leaving the bowl on my pillow like some sort of tooth fairy for forgetful (read: lazy) boyfriends who move into their girlfriend’s apartment and don’t put things back where they belong.
I thought there was no connection between this dutiful action of cleaning and my creative process until this Monday when I was scrubbing the bowl and these words arrived fully formed in my head:
Part of getting older is realizing you spent much of your life being an idiot.
A little fortune cookie there for me to write down as soon as the bowl was back where it belonged.
But after putting those words down and writing out a few more ideas on what exactly I thought I was thinking, I stopped. A question popped into my head that I didn’t like was being asked.
I let the words sit for a few days because I wanted time for this thought at the front of my mind to drift into the background and see if my subconscious could work out any problems before bringing it back to my full attention with a solution. I wanted to come up with an answer – or at least a better answer – to the question I wrote down:
Does that thought only come to somebody who is unhappy with their life?
My immediate answer of “no” was to a different question, the implied one, not the question as it was written.
I hoped the next day’s cleanup would hold the answer. It didn’t.
Ibn Battuta appearing as an aside in a New Yorker article started to shake things loose.
I let out a little gasp of recognition that turned into a headback laugh that gave way to a smile. I hadn’t thought about the medieval traveler since his exploits around the Magrehb were fodder during an Arabic class in college. I can still hear the actor in a video about Battuta accentuating the syllables of al-Sham.
I laughed, but my memories of those Arabic courses are not pleasant. My poor language skills, exasperated by a lack of solid effort to improve them, nearly derailed my studies. All of that altered my life’s direction.
Happening upon Butta reminded me that I had recently run into another character from my past at the memorial for the first teacher who pushed me toward writing, may his memory be a blessing.
While talking to one of my former high school teachers, another teacher recognized me. Despite not having been one of their students and never giving them a second thought in the past decade and a half, I felt shame.
I had been a jerk to her.
I couldn’t remember anything specific but around that time was when I behaved like an unwieldy smart-ass. Somebody who, by the 11th grade, had stopped raising their hand during class discussions because everything was a Socratic seminar, every point was now up for debate and we should freely jump into the conversation.
I may have been (read: absolutely was) a pain in the ass but I wasn’t the biggest pain in the ass in their classrooms, the hallway, or the school at large.1 The teachers made that distinction.
Part of my answer began to form: There were large portions of my life when I made wrong decisions. Not necessarily bad decisions – I eventually did graduate from college after completing my Arabic language requirement – but not the right ones.
The results of these choices have left me regretful. There are decisions I can point to with certainty as the ones that changed the trajectory of my life for the worse. Decisions which were made out of laziness, out of youth, and out of not understanding the full scope of the matter. Different choices in those instances would have made my life… different.
From there, it would be reasonable to believe that the realization you were an idiot during “much of your life” indicates a level of unhappiness.
But the alternative should be considered, too.
Yes, the other side may have made things better. They may have made things worse. I may have made a better choice back then and ended up living an unhappy, unsatisfying life.
And there is the matter of scale: If the choices I made that were ‘wrong but not bad’ were swapped for ones that were both ‘wrong and bad’ I may not have made it to reach this season.
Of course, these are the decisions I think of now as the key ones. They may not have been that important at all.
Does that thought only come to somebody who is unhappy with their life?
My answer to that question as it was written is also no.
The thought comes to somebody who thinks about the past. Somebody who is searching to find the crossroads, the sliding doors moments in the hopes of learning something about themself. And to see if they can change who they will be in the future when faced with a similar decision. And that person may be unhappy with certain aspects of their life, but that is not the only person who thinks of such a statement.
The person examining and looking back at the periods of their life when they think they made a wrong choice is not only thinking about the times they made the wrong choice out of self-loathing or unhappiness. Often the decisions that turned out to be good are just harder to remember. They stick out less.
Another question emerges about how much time I spend thinking about the past.
Our desire to look behind us – even when we’re warned against doing just that – is something I have written about before. And just as I did then, I support the idea of always looking backward, of accepting the risks of what might come from confronting and, at times, aggressively examining the past. There is no way to understand why things are the way they are today without knowing how we ended up here. So everything must be taken into account.
With that, I must admit there was a second sentence that I left out before from my sink epiphany. A second part that addresses the imbalance of memory tilting things toward the negative and supports my answer to the troubling question:
Part of getting older is realizing you spent much of your life being an idiot.
Maturity comes from realizing you are ok with that fact.
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives and works in New York.
The best advice for when I first started going to high school and college parties that may or may not have involved alcohol is advice from my mom. Advice which I never followed carefully enough: ‘You don’t have to be the biggest jerk at the party’