There's a question I've been sitting with lately, and I want to put it to you: If you could reach back through time and ask your 25- or 30- or 35-year-old self just one thing, what would it be?

Here's mine: What do you want for me?

What did that younger version of you envision for the person you'd become by now? What did that version expect? What did it demand?

The answer illuminates something we rarely examine directly: the distance between the self we imagined and the self we've actually constructed. Or the dissonance, if there is any. Or the alignment, if we're lucky.

At 30, most of us saw the road ahead as infinite asphalt and alluring heat mirages. Endings weren't real yet. Our visions for the future were still formative. Some were explicit, others barely conscious ideas of who we'd be at 55, 65, 75, where we'd live, how we'd carry ourselves, who'd be beside us.

I came across a line recently that grabbed my collar: "Discipline is remembering who you said you wanted to be."

There's a lot packed into those 10 words. First, the acknowledgment that at some point — probably many points — you formed a coherent vision of your future self. Second, the distinction between who and what you'd become. We default too easily to defining ourselves by occupation, by title, by what we do for money. But our work is a function of who we are, not the reverse. The job is the output, but the self is the source.

Third — and this is the part that makes the quote sting — you said it. You spoke your vision out loud, whether to yourself in the mirror, to your family, to friends who've since scattered. You may not have been categorical about it. You may have hedged. But you gave it voice, and speaking a personal vision puts life into it, whether you meant to or not.

The fourth element is the hardest: The discipline required to retrieve that vision from the nostalgia drawer and make it actionable again. Memory backed by intent is always hard work.

Those are my reasons for challenging you like this. Here's the exercise: Reach back in time to ask that younger self what he or she wanted for you. Listen without judgment. What would that person, that less experienced, less bruised, more optimistic version of you candidly say?

Maybe more importantly, what about that exchange could change what you decide to do tomorrow morning, next week, next year?

There's a line from a lesser-known F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," that stunned me when I first read it, 30-odd years ago:

"It is youth's felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future."

A radiantly imagined future. That's what most of us had at age 25 or 30. An idea of who we might become that was powerful enough to make the present feel provisional, a mere waiting room for the real thing.

What was yours? How much of it did you build? And here's the question that arguably matters the most now: How much do you still want?

I'm asking because I believe for most of us there's time. Not unlimited time — the heat mirages have evaporated, and the road no longer seems infinite — but enough time. Enough to close some of the distance between who you are now and who you once voiced into possibility. That's where discipline enters.

Sometimes, it takes discipline to remember.

If that doesn't stir you to action, maybe the rocking chair test will. When you're 85 or 95, sitting in your rocking chair looking back at the whole arc of your existence, who will you be most proud of having become?

Go become that person. You've got the discipline and the energy. You've still got road ahead.

To find out more about Paul Von Zielbauer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Paul Bill at Unsplash