Ten Years

When I went back home around New Year’s Day, I found something interesting.

Thirty-three letters from ten years ago.

The envelopes were yellow to begin with, so you could not really tell how they had aged. But the glue had long dried out. The shells of the envelopes opened easily, and the letters slid right out. A strange feeling of two spaces folding into each other rushed up.

I took a photo of each cover and sent it to every classmate I still had as a friend, asking whether they wanted to see what their ten-years-ago self had written. Half of them said yes. Most of the girls wanted it. Most of the boys did not. A very interesting phenomenon.

It was supposed to be a letter to our future selves after graduation, written during one evening self-study session because of some weird student-era sense of ceremony from who knows where. Around graduation, my connection with the school and classmates was not that close, so these letters ended up buried in a box until today.

In modern life, ten years can be crossed in half a day, one day, or at most two or three days. The letters gradually reached the people who wrote them. Apart from the ones who did not want them from the start, the reactions mostly fell into two buckets:

1. Why did I not write this more seriously back then?
2. This is incredibly meaningful.

Some people were hit by the boomerang from ten years ago. They found that their ten-years-ago self had already been very pragmatic about imagining future life or work, and were surprised to see that a life path which sounded almost unbelievable back then had somehow become real today. It was like receiving a reply from ten years away.

Some people found it precious, a lost-and-found piece of memory.

Some felt embarrassed, but at the same time were moved by their ten-years-ago self.

After entering society, we may go through moments of joy, happiness, and fulfillment. We may also find that reality diverges from our expectations, with low points and difficult years. But between the lines, we can still vaguely see how we once lived and thought during that awkward gap between growing up and not yet being grown. Maybe the point is not whether everything we wrote came true, nor whether we were naive or pragmatic. Maybe the point is that those strokes remind us not to forget the self we once were: perhaps sharp-edged and young enough to be reckless, perhaps full of ideals and grand ambitions.

If you believe time can bring many wonderful things, the starting point of the next ten years is now.