Funny thing – the past. There are places and spaces, things and people saturated with it. And it’s as if somewhere between their atoms everything that happened still echoes. Get too close to them, and the past will start seeping back into your cells. The encounters with these guardians of our earlier versions can often be uncomfortable, like the outgrown itchy sweaters, or like trying to fit into a box that took years to climb out of. It is easy to lose focus and begin to gravitate back to the comparisons of all that we once were (or were convinced to be). The tide of peculiar generational repetitions and patterns rises up to meet us, and old tales start bouncing against the branches of the family tree in search for culprits.
I suspect the past constantly reshuffles and changes. Which would explain why different people remember it distinctly, and why memories of certain events will seem so vivid to some and non-existent to others. It is also why sometimes faces of total strangers appear in old familiar photos. Sometimes the past can split so profoundly between its multiple parallel versions that it becomes impossible to bridge it and know what really happened.
My personal favourite quality about the past – really – is that sometimes it never was. Has it ever happened to you that you made a big shift in your life, a huge leap into a new state of being, and you live it so clearly and in such a focused way that the past before the shift – no, not disappears – it simply never existed? You know it but no one else seems to hold any memories about the way it all was before the shift happened.
Isn’t if funny then how often we blame the past or those that came before us for our present or even our future? More and more I am convinced one generation – one individual – is enough to claim the power over the family dynamics that may have repeated for centuries. And when the blame stops, the entire blood line heals – forwards and backwards.
Isn’t it funny then how often we argue about the past? More and more I am convinced that choosing peace in the present moment is far more valuable than trying to “fix” or agree on the “correct” version of what happened.
And isn’t it funny how often and how much we hesitate before making big leaps in our lives because we worry about clashing with others’ memories of us? More and more I am convinced that when we align with our own certainty and knowing, the shift simply happens here and now, rippling through all the here-and-nows that ever were or will be.
Funny thing – the past.
Tags: limiting beliefs loving what is mindfulness past Traveler's Notebook
