revisiting multitudes

I read Jean Hsu’s post on Drama this morning. It’s in her 100 Days of Memories project. She writes about being embarrassed and ashamed of an opinion she’d expressed in an earlier post written when she was younger.

I found her reaction interesting, especially when looking at it through the lens of Thaddeus Howze’s statement “…I contain multitudes” —

If we are serious when we write, then in the moment of writing, we bring our whole selves to the project. We bring our experiences, our past, our education, and our ideas to that moment in time when we write.

Actually, in everything we do, whether serious or not, in the moment of doing we bring our whole selves to that activity — consciously or unconsciously.

We do the best we can in that moment with what we have. If we revisit something we wrote, a decade, a year, or even a day later, we will see things we would do differently now. We have changed in that time and are not the same person we were when we chose the original words. We have had more experiences, met people, had things happen — good and bad — in general, we have lived and, hopefully, learned.

As a result our ideas have changed — sometimes so much that we may barely recognize our previous ways of thinking as our own. As Thaddeus Howze says:

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself…

Each step along the path, each idea thought, every essay written is a part of the process of our evolution. We are all larger than we realize, and we might all contain multitudes. Photos, writing, journals, anything that documents our thoughts at a particular time can show us the path we’ve taken, remind us of the thoughts we held, uncover the skins we’ve shed, and reveal the new ways of being we’ve embraced. We would not be here now if we had not been there then.