At our senior retreat yesterday, I opened a letter I wrote to myself on September 20th, 2002 at my freshmen retreat. I was more taken by it than I expected (maybe because it was handwritten, unlike my typed journal entries from those years). It wasn’t so much what I wrote – although that was quite interesting – but how I ended it. I wrote "Good luck Ben of ’05! -Ben of ’02"
That really symbolizes a central truth of being a teenager: each year so much changes. Everyone knows about the physical changes, but the more important are the emotional and cognitive. Even now, looking back to what I wrote in 2002 reminds me that since I’ve accumulated more experiences I have greater perspective. What excites me is that I’ve accumulated a tremendous set of one-of-a-kind experiences that should (and does) give me perspective that may be slightly different…in a world of intellectual homogeneity.