Does your future resonate with you?
Purple blooms, Robert Frost, and a math boyfriend.
We talk a lot about the past here at The Silent Sod, but today I want to focus on the future. Specifically, I’m wondering if you, like me, have ever felt inordinately drawn to something or someone that later ended up playing a major role in your life.
Here’s a weird example. When I studied abroad in college, my closest friend in the program told me about her older sister’s boyfriend, who would talk about math with her family over dinner. I remember being very intrigued by this mysterious math guy even though I didn’t think I’d ever meet him. Only I did! David and I figured out sometime during our first year together that my study abroad friend was the sister of the woman he met in his math study abroad program and dated for awhile.
Now, I’ve studied survey methods and statistics, and I’m aware of all the types of bias that are introduced when people are asked to recall the past. Maybe my friend’s mention of the mysterious math guy only ended up feeling significant in retrospect because I met the math guy and dated him and eventually married him.
That said, my connection with Amherst has felt similarly foreshadowed. I was in high school when I first learned of the misdeeds of the town and school’s namesake, Jeffery Amherst, a British military leader who encouraged the distribution of smallpox blankets to Native Americans as a means of warfare. I didn’t have a particularly thoughtful strategy for picking out which colleges to apply to, and I remember eliminating Amherst because of his legacy alone. Would this memory have stuck with me if I didn’t have a sense that I would be connected to the institution someday? (Side note: over the past several years, the school has distanced itself from Jeffery Amherst by doing things like changing their mascot from the Lord Jeffs to the Mammoths.)
Here’s another one. In middle school, I was very into Robert Frost’s poetry, even going so far as to write a song about the poet for a class assignment. It turns out Robert Frost has strong ties to Amherst College. He taught here, the library and a nearby hiking trail are named after him, and there’s a statue of him on campus. Could I have somehow sensed in my youth when I was contemplating his road not taken that I would one day be walking the same paths he trod?
Let me take this further. When I was kid, my favorite color was purple, and that’s one of Amherst’s school colors. It’s graduation season, and there are a ton of purple flowers in bloom on campus. Could this too be a sign that I’ve ended up in the right place? Or did I just want to share flower pictures with this post? Probably the latter.
Okay, now I’m maybe starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist about my own life. I do believe in signs and that my intuition has drawn me to places where I’m meant to be, but when I take this too far, life can start to feel like a predestined puzzle that I better figure out or else. There’s a balance to be struck between finding meaning in these connections between the past and future and feeling beholden to them.
What about you? Do you believe in signs or premonitions? If so, where do you see your future connecting with your past?
For me, it’s probably retirement in Rhode Island. In high school, I was very into Roger Williams, the state’s founding father, and his ideas about religious freedom. I almost applied to colleges in Rhode Island solely for that reason, but then I decided to cut off the East Coast entirely in my search.
It wasn’t the right time yet to live so far from Ohio.