You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past…
From “Survivor” by Chuck Palahniuk
Who am I now?
Who have I been?
Who will I become?
Those “who” questions rattle around my psyche on a regular basis although life experience has taught me it is the first one that matters most. “Who I have been” is a far distant second and the future (“Who will I become?”) is way, way, way back in third place. If I do the “now” part well the past relatively quickly begins to be something I am mostly satisfied with and my future unfolds primarily in a manner I can be content with. While who I am “now” rests on a foundation of my past, the present is all I have any control over.
Life has a way of going in circles. Ideally, it would be a straight path forward––we’d always know where we were going, we’d always be able to move on and leave everything else behind. There would be nothing but the present and the future. Instead, we always find ourselves where we started. When we try to move ahead, we end up taking a step back. We carry everything with us, the weight exhausting us until we want to collapse and give up.
We forget things we try to remember. We remember things we’d rather forget. The most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, it fills in blank spaces with details that don’t exist.
But however we remember it––or choose to remember it––the past is the foundation that holds our lives in place. Without its support, we’d have nothing for guidance. We spend so much time focused on what lies ahead, when what has fallen behind is just as important. What defines us isn’t where we’re going, but where we’ve been. Although there are places and people we will never see again, and although we move on and let them go, they remain a part of who we are.
There are things that will never change, things we will carry along with us always. But as we venture into the murky future, we must find our strength by learning to leave things behind. Brigid Gorry-Hines
Being in the “now” is a process of on-going wrestling I have to still do mentally; always will. However, the more I work at it the more successful I become at winning each bout. That sure beats how I once spent most of my life as John Green described it in “Looking For Alaska”; You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking how you’ll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
Most of the time I like living in the present and have been amazed how much better the future turns out when I do. I am grateful to understand my life tomorrow is being built by what I think and do today!
The past is a ghost,
the future a dream
and all we ever have is now.
Bill Cosby
You can’t stop the future
Getting to know myself more intimately and growing wiser with years has helped me see the greatest barrier to knowing “peace” has been ‘me’ all along. Being focused on everything and everyone external as the cause for a lack of tranquility hid the real culprit. But no longer. Awareness I am the key to my peacefulness has been mine for several years now. Yet the newness of this knowledge is still striking when I practice patience and understanding and don’t allow someone to disturb my inner harmony.
“Soon You Will Understand… The Meaning of Life” is a book by William Blank published about a decade ago that only came into my awareness recently. The author is “a
Lived in thirteen states and a foreign country.
For approximately twenty years when asked what I wanted most my response was “peace”. The long-time hope was the demands of work and responsibility would settle down and emotionally I would find real equilibrium with those I care about. Without knowing it “fake it until you make it” was what I was practicing the first ten years I gave that answer.
Trolling through my bookmarks and looking at pages saved as possible inspiration for this blog, I came across one called “List of Life Lessons”. Six hundred and forty individual posts are contained within the list that range from originally insightful to simple restatements of famous quotes. With no particular rhyme or reason, here are nine of them:
If my heart could be seen as living space it would be similar to the room above;
A shortage of happiness I hear talked about frequently but I’ve never heard “there is not enough disappointment in my life”. Those words haven’t fallen from my lips either, yet I know disappointment has been a good teacher. Things not turning out the way I thought has often created a pathway to something better. Dealing with being disappointed helped clear away misplaced beliefs, illusions, misconceptions and self-told lies.
There are nineteen weeks remaining until I retire from a profession I have been engaged in for forty years. There is certainty I will be busier then than now, but with what I specifically want to do. For example, there’s extended travel, a book to finish and publish, far away friends to visit, work to do on my home, several hundred books to read and so much more. It has been my tendency to be busier in my personal life than while working and expect that to accelerate. The excitement that soon my time will be all mine makes me smile every time I think of it.
Good Morning Gratitude 