Over 30 years ago, Bruce Farrer, a teacher at Bert Fox Community High School in Saskatchewan, set his Year 9 students a special assignment and made them a promise. Many years later, his former students were in for an extraordinary surprise when their teacher kept his promise to the letter.
According to CBC News, the assignment that Mr. Farrer gave his 14-year-old students, who had just started high school, was to write a 10-page letter. The letter was to be addressed to the students themselves—but their future selves, several decades down the line. He also promised to post the letters to the recipients on the chosen date—10, 20, or 25 years later.
By the time he retired in 2002, Mr Farrer had collected no fewer than five boxes of letters from the generations he had taught. With extraordinary dedication, he began searching for his former students to fulfil the promise he had made many years before.
For Mr Farrer, reminding his former students—now fully-fledged adults—of their teenage selves is a source of immense joy. The reactions of the former high school students did not take long to come once they received the letters they had written as teenagers. While some may have felt a little embarrassed by the experience, Farrer says that a few called him to tell him how happy they were to have received these letters after so many years.
“It had kind of faded from my memory. To receive it again was pretty special,” said one of Farrer’s former students after receiving the letter. During a CBC programme, Scott read out some lines he had written as a teenager, which reminded him of how he saw himself back then, and enabled him to compare this with how events in his life had actually unfolded. “So, anyway, are you married? To whom? I’ve always wondered if I would get married to somebody I already know now or somebody I’ll meet later on in my life … Did you got to university? Which one?” were the questions the teenage Scott asked the Scott of decades later. Although things didn’t turn out as he’d expected 20 years prior, Scott says his teacher’s gesture “amazed and inspired” him, and he feels “honoured and grateful” to have received the letter.
The professor wanted to teach the students about commitment. “We say we’re going to do something, whether it’s in a marriage, or with our kids. I think it’s important to have a sense of commitment, and maybe in a minor way, the kids see value in that,” said Professor Farrer, as quoted by the National Post.
As well as rediscovering one’s teenage self, writing letters to one’s future self is a reflective exercise about who we will become later in life. Following a study, experts at New York University concluded that our various conceptions of our future selves can significantly influence the long-term choices we make.
Jeanine Nicole, a writer and personal development coach, has suggested a list of questions to answer in a letter to your future self. These include: “What hopes do you hold for yourself in the future?”, “What fears and obstacles do you currently face that you wish to overcome?”, and “What are ways that you can seek to love your future self no matter how much the future varies from what you expect it would be?”
