I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Every piece of art is a time capsule, every poem, every essay, every memoir.

It's a capturing of a very specific time in your life.

It's also a capturing of that time inside a specific version of you, a specific consciousness

that is processing and writing about it.

The facts of the past don't change over time, but our relationship to the facts does.

When we revisit the past, we find it a changed place.

We are the ones who change it with our new perspective and knowledge. For example, if I were

writing my memoir now, it would be a different book.

I'd bring my current understanding and my current emotional state to every personal story, every conversation, every memory.

If I wrote the book 20 years from now, it would be yet another book. If I wrote about my

childhood now, I would describe it differently than I would have described it when I was in it.

When the consciousness behind the narrative changes, so does the narrative.

When the storyteller is transformed, so is the story.

However, and this is a big however, when the poem or essay or book is finished, the life continues. The work is

frozen in time, and its narrator stays frozen in time too. The Maggie Smith, who narrates my

memoir, lives between those two covers. I've had to leave her there,

to thank her for her service, and move on. I'm not exactly that person anymore. I don't feel now

the way she felt back then. Sometimes when I think of that version of me, she seems

very far away, and I remember how afraid and shell-shocked she was, how unsure of the future,

and I want to tell her I'm amazed at what she made when everything was falling apart.

Today's poem reminds me to feel tenderness toward the earlier versions of me. It reminds me that we should acknowledge our past selves more. Just think of what earlier versions of you

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