Back to the Future

I watched Back to the Future this evening with the intention of working out whether I could show it to my sons.  I’m trying to educate them in the ways of movie high-watermarks of the past 30 or so years.  I know they would love the film (what’s not to love?) but I couldn’t remember how ‘grown up’ it was.

One of the things that I thought as I watched was about how the movie is going to seem so old to my sons (they’re both under ten).  I’m not sure that they’ll get some of the cultural references to the mid-eighties.  To them, the film will be a period piece about a man leaving the past, to go further into the past, to then return to the near past, which is referred to as ‘the future’.

Weird.

Anyway, this retro-movie love fest was spliced onto the end of a day that was full of reminiscence for me.

I am moving house with my family and I’ve been trying to clear out the loft.  Our loft is (or, indeed, was) crammed full of all of our sons’ clothes from all the time that they’ve been alive.  I wouldn’t say that we’re hoarders, it’s more that we put things out of sight and hope that they’ll deal with themselves.

Occasionally, as I rifled through old baby-grows and miniature hoodies, I would be hit by a sudden jolt of memory.  One stripy, knitted hat in particular sent me back to a clear, crisp winter’s day when my youngest son was tiny.  So it has been a day of sudden gasps of memory.

I also spent this morning thinking of my home town, Medway.  This place is a fairly deprived, average sort of group of towns, which is obviously special to me.  I will, quite reliably, begin to miss being in Medway every 6 months or so, despite the fact that I left about 13 years ago.  The place is obviously full of people I love and plenty that I haven’t seen or spent time with in too long.  I have several dark memories of my time there to contend with, as well as lots of happy ones.  I think the place is tarnished for me in a, probably unfair, way.

As well as all the nice things that I came across in my loft, there were plenty that reminded me of less happy times.  There were reminders of things I’ve witnessed or things I’ve done that I’m ashamed of or wish had not happened.  All these past events, good and bad, shape and determine my character and behaviour in some ways.

I’ve recently been aware that I’ve been living in a way where I’m allowing my past to affect my behaviour in the present in some unhealthy ways.  For example, it’s easy to convince myself that I’m not the sort of person who does things successfully.

One clear example is with a novel that I’ve been writing for a comically long period of time.  I think it has great potential (I’m biased), but I’m at a certain point, in Chapter 5 that is proving brutally difficult to write.  This is the point where a young man has to climb a wall to get away from his past (I know, in terms of metaphor, it’s hardly subtle, but you know me).  Well, the poor kid has been stuck at the bottom of that wall for at least two years.  I literally cannot bring myself to write him over the wall, get him free and get on with the novel.

I know it’s weird, but I think it rings true for a lot of us.  We become stuck in the illusion that we are a certain person, living with certain damage and cannot get over that wall.  We can’t get over our past and back to the present day – and our futures.

I think that grace is a concept that recognises that we cannot get over that wall.  Instead, it introduces the fact that there is a door.

I suppose I need to begin turning the handle.