Day 289: Living With The Past
The past is like the vines that spring up from little cracks and then they proceed to tangle themselves around objects nearest to them. They crawl forward, pulling at whatever tried to escape from its grasp. Much like the vines that swallow entire trees and buildings, the past tries to swallow us.
We all have a history. Parts of that history we would rather not share with the world, in fact parts of our history we would rather not remember ourselves. And yet there it is, pulsating in the back of our mind, creating vines that creep through your subconscious and lay waste to your mind and your heart. They wrap around us and trap us in a vice like grip. The more we resist, the tighter the binding becomes.
Our past is ever present and ever ready to take control. If we give it an inch, it will take an entire foot. The past creeps forward with every memory we replay and every alternative timeline we dream about. The future seems quite endless, but also impossibly short. The present lasts all but a second. And the past, the past grows with each day that passes by. Each second adds to the layers of our story.
There are closed doors and there are open books. We have things we share openly and there are other things that we never mention or allude to. Our story is complex and confusing, no single person knows ever detail to what has come before and even we tend to forget some things, leaving blank spaces in our narrative.
We are nostalgic and longing people. We remember the things that have been with a certain glow that the present lacks, therefore, everything we used to know becomes so enticing when it transforms into a memory. Our days begin to be filled with remembering and thinking about all the things we did and didn't do.
However, life should not be lived with our focus on the past. Life should not be lived in such a way that we give power to the things we have lived through. The more power we give to our past through thinking and remembering, the more our pasts take on destructive tendencies. When we long to go back, the vines of time gone by become stronger and reach deeper into us.
The past wraps its vines around our minds, keeping us coming back to memories time and again. The past wraps its vines around our hearts, keeping us coming back to emotions time and again. The more power we allow our past to take, the more it will take over our lives. Each day we give to nostalgia becomes another strangling vine that keeps us stuck in what has been.
Our past is there and it will live with us for the rest of our lives. Unlike the future and the present, we know what happened and therefore we long to go back to a time we were familiar with. But nostalgia is a liar and it coats every memory with a rose color in order to captivate our longing.
Fixating on the things that happened and the things we wished would have happened with never help us with the future. Becoming too focused on what was, will destroy any chance of a happy what will be. When we are looking backwards we cannot walk safely forward. The vines that are keeping us in place, can be broken and snapped. We must first become aware that they are there.
The future has not been written yet. However, when we allow the past to ensnare us, we give up the ability to write it the way we desire our future to be written. Never forget the things you have come from, but never allow them to trap you. We will always have a past, but we must learn to live with it instead of submitting to it.
Until Next Time,
Lillian Merritt
"Ensnared"
Part of Fragments of Decay
The sky bursts with vibrant colors singing of the ending of a day. There on the ground crawls the tendrils of days gone past, grabbing and suffocating anything it can wrap around.
