A letter to be opened in five years

Source A: an original imagined account of writing a letter to a future self.

I began by predicting what I would have achieved. The page quickly became a list of tests which somebody five years older would either pass or fail. I crossed out the timetable and wrote about an ordinary afternoon instead: the room, the people I had spoken to and a question I could not answer yet.

I still included hopes. They belonged to the person writing, not to a contract the person opening the envelope must fulfil. I wanted that later reader to understand what seemed important now, even if it no longer seemed important then.

Sealing the letter helped me stop improving it into a more impressive version of my life. It could remain a dated view. The future might answer it kindly without having to make every prediction come true.

Source B: an original imagined reflection by someone opening a letter written five years earlier.

The old letter contained three confident plans. One had happened, one had become irrelevant and the third had led somewhere its writer could not have named. For a moment I read the page like a report on whether I had used the years properly.

Then I noticed a sentence about a friend whose ordinary visits I had forgotten to describe anywhere else. That detail brought back a way the week used to feel. The predictions were interesting too, but they told me about the hopes of that time rather than settling the value of everything afterwards.

I would write another letter. I would leave room for a changed mind, and for things worth remembering which never became goals. A future reader may need a record of who was speaking more than a set of instructions about who to become.

Compare the views in Sources A and B about the purpose of a letter to a future self.