From the time my son was three until he was twenty-three, we took a weeklong father-son trip every summer. It became our rhythm, a pause in the year where it was just the two of us.
A handful of those years brought us to Mount Mitchell, NC. There is something about that place. The cool air, even in summer, and the stillness at the top of the mountain seemed to invite reflection without asking for it.
Mount Mitchell is the tallest peak east of the Mississippi in the United States of America. It also houses a small campground that is cool because of the high altitude, even in the dog days of summer.
It was there that we began leaving notes for our future selves in a small prescription bottle, burying it in the woods to be opened years later. We would write honestly, seal it, and trust that we would find it again. When we did, we weren’t just reading old notes. We were meeting earlier versions of ourselves and seeing what had changed and what had endured.
That’s the actual prescription bottle in the photo.
As this week begins, I am reminded of how powerful it is to hold a vision of your future self, to speak to it as well as to listen to it, just as we did with our notes.
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
– Abraham Lincoln
