From My 80 yo Self, With Love

This weekend I was lucky enough to get to be one of 20 or so med school students to go on a Writing Retreat on the California coast. It was full of interesting conversations, useful writing lessons and the most wholesome farm-to-table food you've ever witnessed. I had to reach out and touch it just to make sure I wasn't staring at an instagram filter. Those kinds of days make my heart both sing and plummet, in all the best ways. 

One of our prompts was to write personal advice as if it was coming from your 80 year old self. Try it sometime. In the meantime, here's mine:

My 80 year old self would want to say what so many obituaries espouse: to value people, places and time above material goods and petty things. But, my 80 year old self will know me and know that my absolute best and downright worst traits already revolve around the maudlin cherishing of loved ones and a crushing nostalgia for life's tenderest moments. 

My 80 yo self will have gone through the death of my parents, and will still be shook to her core, because she knows how my entire existence was shaped by being their child. Old me will know how much time I spent on my friends: on thinking about them, and communicating with them, and visiting them in near and far away places. I got drunk on their balconies, and cried at their weddings, and cuddled their squishy babies while I watched them bask in the mercurial glow of being a new parent. She'll know that my whole life centered around the quest to gluttonously make more of those moments happen. 

She'll know I will have stopped to enjoy the good parts: the misty mornings, the late night tea drinking and the falling asleep wrapped up tight on someone's chest, contentment oozing out of my modest snores. She'll know I had the strength in me to peel myself off the profound depths of the bad parts, even if it took months or years longer I'd hoped. She'll know I won't need the cliché advice: to love, and slow down and soak it all in. My elderly self will be soaked to the bone with love, and happy memories and the touch of cynicism that I know will be with me perpetually. She won't waste her dripping wet soul repeating the unnecessary. Instead she'll say, work hard, for yourself and for other people. Harder than you even thought possible. And don't let your fear of loss close the door to new people, and more memories. Then when she gets up to go, she'll say "and by the way, keep up the good work".