Still Here, Now...
The past is a beautiful thing.
It's beautiful because it's unchangeable, and irreplaceable. That old saying about nothing in life being for sure - well, the past is pretty well guaranteed. And I think sometimes people get confused about how to let the past affect the present.
A few weeks ago I posted a poem called Sesame Memories on this site. It was prompted by my spending an evening in front of the television pasting newspaper clippings into a scrapbook - things I collected several years ago, a time when I had my head stuck even more firmly in the clouds than I do now. Some things I threw away: I couldn't remember why I wanted to keep them. Most I stuck into the book: a random collection of photos and artwork, film and album reviews and human-interest kind of articles.
Like a security blanket, memories can comfort and sustain you, reaffirm your identity and solidify beliefs you find wavering in those dark moments of the soul. Like a blanket memories can also suffocate you, blind you, prevent you from finding a fresh perspective and exploring a brave new world. It can drape itself over all you do and all you meet, colour and texture bleeding into the clean slate that everyone deserves.
The future has a volatile and frightening face...one would suppose.
Does anyone else feel an invisible shove in the back into inevitable uncertainty? No...?
The clippings I stuck into my scrapbook that night reminded me that my past is not a time, it's more like a phase, in that traces of it stay glued to me even once I move on. What I choose to keep and what I let flutter away in the breeze is what defines me as me. I'm the girl who used to prefer the company of books to people, who used to write poems and verses in the homework spaces of a school diary, who couldn't wait to be alone in the house and sing her own songs into a tape recorder and who didn't understand why people didn't get it. I think I may have become the girl who likes the company of both books and people, who writes poems and verses in a spiral notebook reserved for the purpose, who can't wait to get home and use up more hard drive space creating massive .wav files - and who doesn't care if people don't get it.
I could have been different. It's almost scary to think what could be different in my life, had I chosen a different aspect of my personalities-of-the-past to cling to. One event where anger or fear or jealousy sticks like glue and I could be wearing them for life; and so could everything I touch be smothered and perish as I turn back the clock.
I know people who can carry a grudge forever. I know people who make the same mistakes over and over again. I know life travels in circles, and you will end up where you started from, and have to take what you give. What makes the past the past is that if you deal with an event one way the first time and then learn for the better, you never have to deal with it again. Because it's the past, and if you have learnt what to keep hold of and what to let go, the past can't hurt you.
Funny thing about the internet, being the public domain and all - you always know that someone is watching...am I right?
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