Moving On...

“Living in the present” is not a new topic for me. I’ve written about it and mentioned it in other entries in this blog. We all know we cannot change the past and trying to do so means that you are actually living in it while ignoring your present and your hope for the future.

My life has been full over the last many months and I haven’t lived up to my goal of trying to write (it’s my own little psychotherapy) once a month. Some moments were happy and some were sad. Just like most of you, my life has more to be grateful for than to be sad about. Very few, if any, reading this page has to worry about a warm place to sleep at night or where their next meal is coming from. Our problems are small and few.

But we all live a bit in our heads. Most of us look back over an event where we didn’t act the way we wanted to, say the thing we wished, or got the response we needed and re-live it too many times wishing it had all happened differently. It’s human nature to want our moments of wit, glory, and happiness all tied up with a pretty ribbon in a scrapbook of memories. Nothing sullied. No egg on our faces or hurt in our hearts. Storybook Heroes are what we wish to be—past, present, and future.

The death of someone significant in your life will absolutely make you move on from any hope of changing the past or seeing it adjusted to a happier place in the future. What I needed acknowledged or just heard will never happen. All the time invested in trying to change those old pages of my Memory Scrapbook to only happy, loving pictures is done. Close the book, file it away.

The lesson here is that the pain in that relationship was useless. Not insignificant, but useless. You might say it helped me find a happier place because the goal was to have no more of that in my life than I already had. But in the big picture, trying to change the past still colored the present. I had so much more to be grateful for than I had to be sad about. Not acknowledging that and living that truth every day was wrong.

A recent birthday puts me in mind of how little time I see in front of me. The list of things to do grows and the time to do them shortens. Moving on. No more Storybook Hero Fantasy for me. Just life, faced with a smile for whatever I’m lucky enough to have come my way.