Before Words

Forewords are not to be confused with forwards.

Let’s start with the similarities. Both words have Old English origins, and both of them start with the prefix fore.

In both words, fore means something akin to the front of something. If you’ve ever been on a boat, you’ve probably heard this term used as a word in isolation, with its original meaning still intact. If you’ve ever played golf (or even if you haven’t), you’ve probably heard someone yelling out fore!

The word forward emphasizes this… this very essence of frontness. The second part of the word—ward—comes from Old English’s weard, which could be used all by itself to mean in the direction of. Toward comes from the same place, and you can hear the same root in words like reward or warden.

So, forward was in the direction of the front, but a foreword is a collection of words that come before other words. You’ll find them in the front of the book, and you might need to turn the pages forward to get to the foreword, but that’s where the similarities end.

Sometimes, an author will write their own foreword, as I’m doing here. I’m introducing a much bigger project I’ve been working on, and I wanted to let you peek behind the curtain just a little today.

The project I’m working on involves a lot of detective work—of me investigating my own past, so that I can piece together the events of my life.

As I approach the age of fifty, I’m thinking about those really important moments in my life when everything changed for me based on a decision or circumstance—inflection points, in other words. Turning fifty and hitting an organic midpoint, even if it’s only in my own mind, may be one of these moments.

That’s because I’ve put off this sort of deep self-reflection for most of my life. Like most Gen Xers entering puberty during the mid- to late-80s, I watched a lot of Married… with Children. This irreverent show presented a cautionary tale about a man named Al Bundy (incidentally, played by a real-life BJJ black belt) who simply can’t stop reliving his glory days.

He even tells a story in several different episodes about a high school football memory where Al saved the day, becoming the hero, and scoring four touchdowns in a single game.

Al doesn’t evolve from the person he was back in high school, and he doesn’t learn any lessons from studying his past. That’s because he remembers his past as he wants to.

By contrast to Al Bundy, the Hubble Space Telescope was designed to see clearly into the distant past of our universe. We would soon be able to discover how our earliest galaxies had formed, and who knows what other clues might be visible in these glorious images we’d soon have.

Unfortunately, there was a major issue with the Hubble upon its 1990 launch: the first images scientists got to see were badly distorted, and nearly worthless. It turned out that the lens wasn’t made perfectly according to the specifications, but was instead just a hair too wide. Actually, it was more like one fiftieth of a human hair’s width off, but that was more than enough to ruin the precision.

Here was a multi-billion dollar space ornament, just kind of worthlessly orbiting our planet. What was needed was a new lens and a new launch, and scientists at NASA finally got one three years later. After a painstaking and delicate operation, the new lens was installed, and we got a few candidates for the most mind-blowing images ever taken, called the Hubble Deep Field. Every speck or smudge is a galaxy with perhaps hundreds of billions of stars:

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For my entire life, I’ve avoided trying to live in my own past the way Al Bundy does. Reliving your glory days all the time makes it seem as though your life, today, doesn’t matter. I wasn’t interested in that sort of wallowing.

I’ve kicked the deeply introspective can down the road for far too long, and now I find myself desperately wanting to write some of these malleable memories down before they completely disappear. I also know that having a properly calibrated lens is everything.

And, of course, I am the lens through which I experience literally everything. I had better make sure I’m calibrated properly.

This is, therefore, a year of deep self-reflection for me. I want to know how I see the world, so I can see the past as it really happened, not some distorted view like that first glimpse Hubble gave us with the wrong lens.