Edel Coffey: Filling out the census' time-capsule is like writing your own eulogy

Edel Coffey: the census' time-capsule has evoked thoughts of time's passing

Tomorrow, we fill out the census form, and I think I may have underestimated the pressure of coming up with something worthy to put in the time capsule section. In short, I’m stuck. Initially, I thought the time capsule was a lovely idea. What could be more charming than sending a note to our descendants? But as the deadline approaches I find myself paralysed with indecision. What pearls of wisdom could I possibly offer that could give some meaningful insight into life in 2022? A description of an antigen test? The fact that a face mask is no longer a beauty treatment?

Usually, a time capsule involves putting a collection of random everyday objects into a box and letting the artifacts do the talking but with a written time capsule, it’s different. It feels a bit like writing your own eulogy, trying to get at the essence of your life, or even just the essence of your life right now. What of us is worth mentioning, never mind remembering, committing to posterity? The pressure!

What should we include in an epistolary time capsule? I think it’s a mistake to try to encapsulate the spirt of the time, the zeitgeist, to include all of the historical details around us. History will take care of those for us. The time capsule is for remembering the ordinary, the individual, the humdrum, the tiny human details.

So we don’t necessarily need to inform our descendants about the fact that Russia is waging war on Ukraine but we might make a note of the fact that some of us will have Ukrainian refugees staying in our spare rooms on census night. Who they are and what they have gone through will be essential to include in the time capsule.

I wracked my brains for something that would accurately and pithily define my life. Who am I, I wondered, Sartre-like over my morning coffee? What are the talismans that best represent my life in 2022? All I could come up with was an iPhone. Will there even be iPhones in a hundred years’ time? Will there be people? The coffee wasn’t even half-empty and I was already riding a low rolling wave of existential despair.

I suppose I could talk about the usual thing, the kind of clothes we wear now, how this thing called coronavirus has impacted us in such a big way, how certain technologies work in our lives, how we mostly meet over Zoom and have a blazer and lipstick within easy reach of our desks in case we need to look professional in our athleisurewear. I could write about what passes for entertainment these days, the rolodex of streaming services we flick through without ever finding anything to watch.

Or I could just do the Irish thing and fall back on the failsafe of talking about the weather. Maybe a note about how the cherry blossom trees we planted two years ago are currently in bloom. In my head, these cherry blossom trees are connected to the cherry blossom tree that I grew up with. 

The one that an aunt bought my mother for a birthday present when I was still a child, the one that showered us gently with silky pink petals every spring, the one that that grew and grew and grew until it put a crack in our wall and my father cut it down and it felt like someone had died. It’s hard not to think of the future and the past, of time’s great levelling action, when filling out our census forms. 

Will my three cherry blossom trees still be standing in a hundred years? Will someone else get to inhale their gentle scent on spring mornings? I hope so.

I’ve only ever done one other written time capsule in my life. It was a letter to my future self, written when I was about 12 or 13 as part of one of those religious retreats that were big in schools in the nineties. I found the letter about ten years ago and was surprised at the assumptions younger me harboured about older me.

The letter might as well have started with the words ‘Dear Extremely Boring Old Person That I Have Become…’ I think that’s one of the mistakes we make about imagining our future selves, or even just the future. We see it as alien, disconnected from who we are now, when in fact time and experience seem to bear out the hypothesis that we don’t change, that we remain the same people our whole lives, just with added wrinkles.

The census brings all of these abstract questions to the fore of our minds. It’s not ideal Sunday night mood music but perhaps the reason I am stumped as to what to write is that the census is an unavoidable reminder that we are mortal, that in a hundred years all that will remain of most of us will be the facts and figures recorded in this census, and the scribbles we made in the time capsule… if we can manage to come up with the requisite words.