The past is gone but something might be found to take its place.
–Gin Blossoms/Hey Jealousy
Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.–Bil Keane
Yeah, sure, today is a gift, but I hate that quotation. For one thing, as far as I can tell, it came from that irritating Family Circus cartoonist. I’m not saying that he’s wrong–every day is a gift. His way of stating it just makes me want to poke him in the eye with a hot fork.
And to think I was worried I’d have nothing to say today. Why was I worried? I could always do a post about all the people who I’d like to poke in the eye with a hot fork.
(Momentary absence as I actually made a note to do this someday. Not. Even. Kidding.)
No, I haven’t ever poked someone in the eye a fork. I have bitten people though. I’m not going to talk about that today. No, it’s not a long enough list for me to write a post about it.
So, do I have a point that I’m going to get to eventually? Other than the point of a fork? Kind of.
Am I going to share it with the people? I’m going to try. Bear in mind that I’m still heavily medicated.
It’s really more of a Gin Blossoms point– when stuff is in the past, what do we get to have now? Sure, the past is the past and the present is the present and we should live in the now and all that shit, but that doesn’t mean that the past is unimportant, does it? Do we just leave it there and move on? No one from the past need ever darken our metaphorical doors again?
I don’t think so.
Everything we are in the present comes from everything that we did or had done to us in the past. Everyone we knew. Everyone we encountered in any way. We have to carry a certain amount of that forward. We have to (ideally) learn from it. We become who we are today as a result of all the stuff that happened in the past. Hopefully, we learned to treat others better based on how we felt when we got treated in a way we didn’t like.
But people from the past do not always stay there.
Sometimes it’s hard to know how to deal them. Maybe the ones you didn’t like much. Or the ones you liked too much who didn’t like you. Or the ones who stopped liking you. Or maybe you just thought people didn’t like you but they just didn’t know you. The list is endless, really.
What do you do with those people from your past?
Mostly, you keep an open mind. The open mind you probably didn’t have about them back in the day.
Act like you’ve never met them, kind of. In most of the important ways, you really haven’t.
Keep anything really ugly that might have happened in the back of your mind, but don’t be too quick to assume that ugliness is what will happen now.
If they are people who have hurt you, try to keep forgiveness in mind. You can’t change what might have happened in the past, but does it gain you anything to still hold onto the resentment and hurt? You might not want to have anything further to do with them, but that doesn’t mean you can’t forgive them and let go of the anger and hurt. You really don’t need it. It doesn’t change what happened. In a lot of cases, assuming that they weren’t an axe murderer or something, once you let go of the hurt and forgive, you can move on to a real life friendship with them now. Really. You can.
When people from the past do come back into your life, it can be wonderful! I have a lovely group of friends who I knew only slightly in High School and have come to know better in the last several years. If we’d all assumed we were all exactly the same as we were back then, we’d have never become friends now. I’m happy that isn’t what happened.
I suppose it could also be awful, but that’s not an experience I’ve had personally. There are people I’ve run into who I don’t really care to hang onto, but I can just let them go right on by.
A lot of people I know have met up with past loves in the last several years. A lot of people I know are now in happy relationships with those past loves. Some people I know have other relationships that have been dented a bit by those encounters, or destroyed all together. It’s hard to find a balance when there are still strong feelings for people from your past. You want to reconnect, but it can be very tempting to take it all too far too fast, and everyone ends up in metaphorical pieces. Don’t ask me what the answer is on this one. I don’t know. I guess the answer is that things end up the way they end up. Hopefully, the way they are supposed to end up.
So, what do we find to take the place of the past?
Apparently, a metric shit ton of clichés.
And the present.
If you believe another song lyric, we get what we need. Which is quite a lot.
What I need, evidently, is an editor. And based on the amount of coughing I’m doing, a big dose of codeine.