It’s hard to shake the past sometimes… Or is it? I feel that tug, the pull of places and people and events once lived and now no more… What was the substance of an experience from many years ago? Where is it now? Can I really let go, like the simple sayings that seem to show up and promise to fix it all, in a flash?
I am no saint, my friend. Past stuff that I would rather never remember, is triggered. A mantra repeats subliminally, guiding me ever away from regretful moments. Yet some return regularly, sneaking in, snaking along in and out of my present moments.
A new year. It’s here again. Just as they have come before. Freshness, a blank slate. Resolutions, ha! It’s a day, right now, just like every one of them have been. Full of potential that can leak away by the minute. A ‘bad one’ that we want to just ‘get thru’.
I have worked with professionals on letting go of the past. I have dissected specific moments that I wanted to re-program in my mind. It has worked. It’s a neat thing. To verbalize a hurt, or a wound, over and over again, until it causes pain no more. Nothing, not even a flinch. It can be done.
My past is a thing that carries no matter. ‘It’ isn’t quantifiable in any real way as I move through my day. It is a backpack or trunk or semi-trailer-load of junk, that simply doesn’t exist anywhere but in my cavernous mind. Plenty of room for it there, although it seethes and pulses with exhausted heaves. It fogs my vision. I am talking about the past of today, and the past of years gone by. The moments I said things I wish I could take back. The times of opportunities wasted. This second. Where I’d rather be asleep. In the recent past, I can see where I ‘could have’ done so much more. I could have already finished my blog tonight. I regret, that I didn’t before. Dramatic idn’t it 🙂
Yeah so what. I do that stuff. I hang on to hurts and wish I would have been better earlier and all the while I miss the right now moments to improve and look on brighter sides. I miss the silver linings all around me. I know this too. So what. So this is what an experience of life is like. This is something that I can decide is bad, or decide is not bad. I usually choose the former, and carry my junk and suffer for it. Usually.
Then there are times when I don’t. Times in fact that order comes to all. Balance is achieved in the asymmetry. A perfect storm reveals the hidden meanings to all the heartaches. A spiritual self triumphs while the ego struggles within the boundaries of the world. This little moment exists in tandem to it all.
I truly ponder the nature of the experience of life. I feel so detached from it sometimes. Like a bad Youtube clip, where the audio doesn’t quite match the image, and it freezes and buffers, then jumps ahead after being unresponsive. Then again, the feeling can be so literal and connected, that each rotation of the clockwork cogs are noticed. The world and ourselves seem completely in synch, machined to mutually move together.
Caught in between is where I find myself at the beginning of this ‘so called’ new year. In this little moment, adolescence. The yearning for clarity and purpose and a place to fit, while the changes going on, are impossible to understand. Shifting from childlike joy, to something else, a transformation of self, is just tough, on me, on everyone around me.
Where then, does ‘the turn’ happen? That place where we run out of room to continue on any certain path, and we must do that scary thing, leaning downhill and free falling for a moment, before catching ourselves again, on a new vector, a fresh line. I guess it happens when it has to.
More ‘successful’ people than me, will tell you how they make goals and commitments and create a life path that they choose, well in advance of arriving there. I’ve played some with those concepts. I could write a whole blog post here about how this year, I will do X-Y and Z, and make big sweeping promises to myself, to you. I won’t.
Truth is, that like a lot of people. I don’t make a change, until the pain of staying the same, seems greater than the pain of trying something new. There, I’m normal again.
That ole junky load of baggage and historical rubbish is there to keep me on track then I guess. I do recreate in my mind constantly, a land in which exists all my failure and missteps and regrets. It holds a place on my mental world map, that I can steer clear, and learn to avoid. It’s helpful in that way. It’s a way I can love me, just a little more. Self-help.
But! While I have my eyes focused on where I don’t want to go again, I sure end up in some strange new places. This voyage has me lost in new worlds that are quite unfamiliar. Not in a good way either. At least my ego doesn’t like them.
Odysseus finally found his way back home. His journey was anything but swift. He would get closer to home, then swept again waaay out to a far off land. Many times he was at the mercy of the Gods, with no hope to save himself at all.
A good story will do that ya’ know.
The best always do.
Mine seems to mirror some of those epic journeys, and I recently I find those real dark times with the walls closing in…
What about yours? Can you see your way out, always, without a hint of fear or anxiety? I hope so, for your sake. I could probably see that you have it made and can always triumph at any time. Maybe you can see that for me too?
We can’t see ourselves as we can see others. We can’t quantify the weight of our baggage. We can work on becoming comfortable and quiet and brilliantly joyful, at the realization that it is all perfect, as it always has been, and it always will be…
right now.
And even that, will arrive in perfect and fleeting glimpses of magical moments. And then they’re gone…
Sincerely,
the former version of Aaron Nichols. the current version of Aaron Nichols, and the versions to come, of Aaron Nichols, in all their weirdness, broken-ness and beauty…
Happy 2014 🙂
That’s good stuff.