It occurred to me today that if I ran into my 18-year-old self in the parking lot, he probably wouldn’t recognize me enough to stop and say hi.

Rounding past the halfway point in my college career, I realize that until now, I never felt old enough to be able to look back on my life and have much to say about it. But it’s been years since high school graduation, and even longer since I met many of the friends I still have today.

Even just three years ago, I may have imagined for myself something completely different, though I can barely recall what it was now. All I know is that the reflection I caught of myself in the windows behind the Union the other day would have blown the mind of the 2012 version of myself.

Suddenly, it seems our cohort has the ability and passive desire to look back over almost two decades of solid memories and try to figure out how they led up to the present.

What about five years from now? Will I be as unrecognizable to my future self as my present self would be to my past self?

It’s a strange situation when you feel good about the present but still miss lots of great emotions had in the past. Wouldn’t it be great to run through a park in the middle of the night playing tag with 20 of your closest friends again?

I’ve been trying to decide what’s different between the middle school summers spent playing cops and robbers and today’s weeks spent driving to friends’ apartments and managing a budget to afford one of my own — both lifestyles are great, but, man, I’d trade a month or two of Fall semester to relive those days every once in a while.

But as soon as I thought that, I discovered the pitfalls of reminiscing. It becomes instantly clear that exactly that is the difference between past self and present self — past self would never have invested so much emotion in thinking about anything other than his version of now.

It’s like the fancy rich folks who still go to Broadway musicals wearing top hats and wielding their grandfathers’ canes; if you ask them why they dress that way to go to shows, they’ll say, “We’re trying to emulate the hundred-years-ago people we admire for treating the theatre this way.”

Fair enough, but you’re doing a crap job of it. The one thing we know about those past people is that they weren’t trying to emulate anyone but themselves. What was interesting about them was that they did their own thing and focused on the now. By trying to act like them, you instantly separate yourself from the cores of what they believed in.

In the same line, what made those summers so great was that they were the only thing I put my mind on as they happened. They weren’t great because I was trying to recreate memories from elementary school, so why would I think today can be great if I try to emulate the good parts of the past?

If anything, we should have learned that the best plan of action is to stay right here, right now.

Even if that means going to work and acting like an adult, the present-centric feel of it is more like what made us awesome in middle school than you might think.

Will Beaton is the Editor-in-Chief of The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].