Living in my past…

"Another Monday, another week" I said.

You know, somebody told me to stop living in the past today. Facebook is a strange place, a place where comment can be interpreted in any way the reader wishes and strings of a conversation can grow like a Chinese whisper and what starts off as a flower can easily end up as a cabbage or even a slug. Words are so easily open to interpretation (thank God and damn it).

I posted about how much I miss driving to Scarborough on a Monday morning, I haven’t done it for over a year and I do miss driving to Scarborough on a Monday morning to meet with people I liked seeing. I do miss driving my company car, watching the sunrise as I powered along the rise and fall of the A64. My Monday mornings are dull these days compared to that, my week isn’t quite as hectic or as much fun, but hey it has its highs. Yes, I miss ‘back then’ and yes, I do want to remember and certainly don’t want to forget. ‘Back then’ was a really good time most of the time and those memories are my help on grey days (not that I need to get any help). Those memories make me smile.

Stop living in the past? Just why would I want to stop living in my past, it’s a good place to visit. Anyway, how could I stop even if I wanted to, how can any of us? We are the sum total of all our past experience, we are our pasts, that is how it is meant to be. Without our past experiences we are nothing, ask anyone who knows an Alzheimer sufferer. That spider crawling across our childhood pillow has become the scream each time we see a spider in a bath, just as each time I see a picture of a palm tree I’m immediately taken back to the most wonderful morning of my life. I can’t divorce my memory from my now and why would I want to, why would anyone even expect me to?

Our minds are full of memories, some up front and others locked in grey cabinets behind the doors of double locked rooms. Our subconscious can make us forget experiences that are too painful for us to remember. We all do it, we have a few incidents that we can hardly remember at all, still there but not known about. It’s a protection thing, a mechanism that nature has given us to keep us safe, similar to a mechanism that damps down our repetitive and boring experiences; how dull to remember each and every time you’ve washed up, every dish, plate and spoon.

There are ways to get to these hidden memories, access those rooms deep inside your mind and confront the experience that it makes so hard to find, it’s called regression therapy and it’s a powerful thing. Of course, you can try to live entirely in the present, shut off what’s in those double locked rooms, but everything is influenced by your past and I for one think that a good thing, a survival thing. If our past didn’t tell us that putting your hand into the fire might hurt, then you’d constantly put your hand into the flames for fun.

Yes, if there is one thing that I’ve learnt recently, living in the past, or at least reflecting on it, is a good thing. Without that how are we going to make our futures better? Putting it all behind you and soldiering on regardless, living entirely in the present. How stupid. How dangerous. Didn’t someone once say “Lest we forget”?

I’ll live where I want and I’ll keep my memories, even if it does mean I spend some of my time living in the past.