Forgotten History, Forgotten Future

The argument that studying the past makes us learn from the mistakes held there just doesn't work for me.  Reliving the past, over and over again, just seems to hold me there, not in wisdom but usually regret.  It can also be a place of judging others and what they did to me.  None of it helps me to grow in the least because in that place, the past, nothing changes, it is what it is.

So when I'm going about my day and all of a sudden I catch myself thinking about something that happened "in the past", I stop and hit the delete button in my mind.  Sometimes I have to push it more than once because my mind wants to know why I'm thinking about this or that.  It will try any trick in the book to get me to stay there with it.  It wants to figure it out somehow, how did things come to this?  How did I arrive in this place?  Negative emotions, for me, almost always accompany this process of scanning the past for an explanation.

So everyday, more and more, I'm giving up the past.  This is not the same as making peace with it or accepting it.  Personally, I neither need nor want to do that because this is just giving it the attention it seeks.  The past to me is like this whole other being that just loves pain.  Even though I have good memories too, I rarely find myself unconsciously conjuring up something wonderful that happened and becoming consumed in it.

I think there is the whole dynamic of how thinking about the past creates whatever difficult situations you found there and repeats them.  Some say this is how we learn our lessons in life, a similar situation keeps arising until we learn it's meaning but it's never worked for me because as long as I am deriving my information about a present situation from a past situation I find I repeatedly have the same reaction to it over and over again.  Time for something new.

So I'm dissolving the past today and moving in a new direction.  The first step for me in this process is to continually take the present moment and notice what is in it.  I listen for sounds and look at what is really there, this room, my child, this computer, these words.  Then I accept what I find as being exactly as it is instead of saying to myself "if only I was somewhere else" or "if only I had gone there."  I am where I am now.  It doesn't matter how I got here, what matters is what I am doing now and I turn my attention to finding something useful to do.

Likewise, I refrain from thinking about the future because no amount of thinking about that can predict or prepare me for something that may or may not happen.  I don't know about you, but I have never once imagined how something might happen and then experienced it exactly as I imagined.  In all cases, it has always been completely and utterly different, sometimes worse than I thought but on the whole, the future is always better than I thought it would be.  Of course, it's all a matter of perception anyway because isn't a situation bad only if I label it bad?   And just what am I basing my judgement on?  I'm basing them and weighing them against my past.

So my goal is not to let anything that I see be seen through the colored glasses of my memory.  Then I will surely miss what's here to be found because anything found at the other end of the lens is no longer what it is but distorted and diluted from the murky film.  So my day becomes a meditation, I am helping to clean my friends home, mopping floors, cleaning a bathroom, laundry, vacuuming, and spraying for bugs.  I don't care for chemicals but in this case it is necessary, and history or no history, the roaches need to move out.

I can look at it as drudgery, a chore to be endured, or I can enjoy every moment knowing that my being needs to be useful and no act of usefulness is ever wasted.  But before I can do that, I will need to get off this post and get moving.

Have a present day!