The past.

Like the back seat of the bus it feels safe and secure but living there means you miss everything that is happening now, before your eyes.

I have been thinking about the past lately and how it can imprison people if they are not careful and the act of writing about such a things feels fraught with irony. Nevertheless observations are worthwhile, no matter what they are about.

The past is valuable only as a foundation to the present; only as experience. To live there however; to be rooted there, suggests the present and therefore the future, have been given up upon. This is a very hopeless perspective when you think about it…when the past dominates our thinking and our actions we become relics…we become the past and ultimately we become quaint but irrelevant. Invisible.

Don’t get me wrong – I love to reminisce. I mean I spend a lot of time with some of our local oldsters and they have fantastic stories but the value in them is wisdom to me and the passing on of experience.

What I am referring to is something more insidious, the changing of a mindset from bright, hopeful, forward thinking to one buried in the darkness of the unchangeable. It is a place of rust and fatigue; a place of obsolescence and regret; it is corrosive poison on the soul.

The only antidote is the light of looking ahead at the prospects of an unwritten page. A blank sheet unencumbered with the stains of spilled ink simply awaiting the hand to illuminate it.

There is always hope when one is looking ahead and as creatures bound in time for now, that is how we are wired – to look ahead. If we were to read our stories in reverse it would be a sad depressing affair ending in oblivion but when read properly the book never ends and the brightest light lays ahead which is reflected in the exclamatory proclamation –

“Behold, I make all things new!”