There's a feeling that comes to me when I read a piece of writing that has a tone I would describe as wistfully contemplative.
Nostalgic isn't quite the right descriptor, but comes pretty close.
It's the feeling of misty mornings that remind you of grade school days. The feeling of field trips and bus rides and your whole universe clustered under one roof, as though the sun revolved around the room where you took AP Biology.
Or maybe I am just describing the feeling I had this morning, while walking through the halls of Life Academy in Oakland. It was the first time I'd stepped foot in a high school in five years. Five years can change a person, mould them into someone unrecognizable to even themselves. Five years in a young person's life can span several lifetimes.
I talked to a class of high school juniors and seniors about my journey through the tech industry thus far. What brought me to Notion, what drew me to software engineering, the lessons I'd accumulated over the last five years. I talked, knowing that everything I'd said was only a breadcrumb for them, and that the purpose of telling my story was as much for myself as it was for them.
I loved how the things I have come to know as quotidian were still novel to these students. Seeing my world through the eyes of outsiders reminded me of how I felt, back when these knowns were unknowns.
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When I was a kid, I remember thinking that any moment that existed in my conscious memory was no more than a few years ago. If I could recall it, it was three years ago, maybe four. No more than five.
Then, sometime in the last one-and-a-half decades, the years started to bleed into each other. The delimiters between each day grew fuzzier. Individual incidents took on hues: rose-tinted, blue, sepia. Some became sharper. Others lost clarity.
Maybe that's why revisiting moments in our past can be so valuable. The distortions we apply to our subjective experiences become our new reality. We create and recreate our pasts through the lenses of the present. Then, inevitably, we recreate the present, to make sense of the reconstructed story that led us to where we are.
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