Sometime while I was in the MTC, I started a list of things that were cool and that I didn\u2019t want my mission to make me forget or turn my back on. I wrote things down on a loose sheet of paper that I kept, folded, in my journal. I\u2019d love to see it now, to look at what 19-year-old me thought 21-year-old me (and, presumably, 35-year-old-me, knowing my self-absorption at the time) should be. Sadly, it fell out of my journal at some point long, long ago. But the list may or may not have included hair- and facial-hair styles, music, and literature. The list was at least a side and a half of the paper, so I\u2019m entirely sure I had constructed a full 360-degree aesthetic for myself. <\/p>\n
Looking back, I’m pretty sure I was trying to bind my future self to make sure I didn\u2019t become one of those losers who suddenly just listens to MoTab (or who says, \u201cMoTab\u201d) and wears braided belts with tucked-in polo shirts, or whatever it was I didn\u2019t like when I was 19.<\/p>\n
In high school and through the beginning of college, my goal was to become a jazz or rock musician. And today I teach business and tax law classes at law school, after having practiced for a number of years at a white shoe firm in New York. And I couldn\u2019t be happier, although the 19-year-old me would likely be disgusted by the 35-year-old version of me. But I couldn\u2019t be happier with the career I have.<\/p>\n
At the same time, my family, baptism, mission, temple endowment, etc., have bound me to the Church. These bonds I haven\u2019t broken, and I don\u2019t regret continuing in Mormonism. But the contrast with my MTC list is interesting to me: is there a qualitative difference between my successful and unsuccessful attempts to create a future me?<\/p>\n
To some extent, the answer may be the difference between covenants and non-covenants. I take the idea of covenants very seriously. But covenants can still be broken, often without much more short-term repercussions than deciding that, no, I\u2019m not really budding rock star after all.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve successfully bound my future self in other ways as well: I have a mortgage, for example, and had an auto loan for a while. But those seem somehow different: as long as I make my payments, Chase doesn\u2019t really care if I\u2019m a rock musician or a law professor, a Mormon or a Catholic. That is, unlike both the 19-year-old aesthete and the various-aged covenantor, these obligations, while fixing my future actions, don\u2019t reflect on my identity.<\/p>\n
Whatever the reasons, though, it turns out that I am who I am today both because of and in spite of my younger self.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometime while I was in the MTC, I started a list of things that were cool and that I didn\u2019t want my mission to make me forget or turn my back on. I wrote things down on a loose sheet of paper that I kept, folded, in my journal. I\u2019d love to see it now, to look at what 19-year-old me thought 21-year-old me (and, presumably, 35-year-old-me, knowing my self-absorption at the time) should be. Sadly, it fell out of my journal at some point long, long ago. But the list may or may not have included hair- and facial-hair styles, music, and literature. The list was at least a side and a half of the paper, so I\u2019m entirely sure I had constructed a full 360-degree aesthetic for myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16141"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16143,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16141\/revisions\/16143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}