Time Capsules

I am a fan of time capsules. The whole idea of digging up a container filled with icons of a different era is very appealing to me. Maybe I should have been an archeologist.

Perhaps if we were going to bury a time capsule today, one that would be unearthed 50 years from now, we would put in today’s newspaper, a blackberry, an empty piggy bank, a model wind turbine, and whatever else would exemplify life in the present. What would you put in there?

The idea, of course, is for people of the future, or perhaps even aliens, to be intimate with life at that former time.

I suspect that you have your own time capsule, only it’s not meant to depict social norms as much as it your personal circumstances. And, you probably add to your container when memorable events occur. And you look at it every so often. (So it might not be a time capsule in the strict sense).

I have one of these too: it’s called “a box in my basement.” Mine has a mint condition, plastic-sealed Al Kaline card, my Man from U.N.C.L.E. membership card, my grade 4 report card saying “Arthur fidgets in class”, a love letter I got in grade 7, a Canadian one dollar bill, a post card I sent from a small town along the Bruce Trail which I hiked when I was 13, a memento of a school trip I took to Italy in grade 12, a ball bearing that I won playing marbles in grade 2, my last academic philosopher paper…things like that.

I also have a diary that I’ve been keeping since 1974. A friend gave me a “nothing book” for Christmas (hard cover, blank pages). It’s kind of like a time capsule because it tells me what my inner world was like at the time of each entry. At the beginning I wrote in it twice a year or so, but now, 30 years later, it’s once every few years at best. And the early entries were one or two pages, while more current entries are just a few lines. “Mother died. It does indeed appear that I've processed a lot of this already."

Sometimes I wonder about my motivation for this record-keeping tendency. My friends and family sometimes remark that I have a thing around holding onto the past. (Actually they say I have a lot of “things”, meaning quirks, neuroses and peculiarities). But I don’t think my interest in making periodic notes to myself that I can read in the future is so bad.

My favourite thing in this regard is to make file entries in my computer of newspaper articles that forecast doom and gloom so that when, for example, the doom doesn’t come, I can adjust my level of trust in that source.

I don’t just do this with newspaper articles. I even do it with myself. For example, when the disease SARS hit, my business was affected. Around that time I found myself catastrophizing. “The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” I thought. I wrote about that fear in my computer journal (those kinds of things don’t make it to the handwritten diary). But now, with the provocative swine flu, I reread that entry and say, “oh.” I learn from my time capsules.