Life-Love 99: Retelling the past through the eyes of the present

We love to run forward, but how often do we take the time to think back. To allow ourselves to be overcome by a desire to journey into our past, explore it, relive it.

We have all experienced what it feels like to suddenly feel awash in memory. To momentarily leave the present and be transported, through the swirling stream of consciousness back to moments we have already lived. Some of them good, some of them sad – many of them times we wish to be able to take back or at least revisit. Remembering the past allows us to retell our old stories to ourselves through the eyes of the present.

It is important to relive the past, but it is also important to retell it in the words of the present. It is easy to allow the past to fester in the feelings attached to the moment of our experience of it. A terrible break-up, the loss of a loved one, a moment when we were rude or dismissive of someone – all of these are events in our lives which live on in our memories. The trouble is that we often let them sit like a great big anchor keeping us fixed to a place that should be left behind us.

To retell the past in the words of the present is to allow ourselves to grow and move forward. This is not revisionist history. No one can change the facts of the past. We can, however, change our understanding of them, put them in context. Often this means finally judging one of our past actions as bad, and then moving on from it, having made our peace with it, accepted that we did something uncaring, or stupid, or reckless or selfish, and then rejected it. That is a liberating thing. It means we can clear that blemish from our hearts, and walk with a spring in our step again. To simply accept regrets as “part of me” without being critical of them, evaluating them or rejecting them make prison-houses of our memories.

To retell the story of the past through the lens of the present is profoundly human. It fits into the idea that “time heals all wounds.” It is liberating. It makes us understand that we are limited by context, and we should be aware of this limitation.

Really, this way, the pain then can become part of the happiness now, as was famously said by C.S. Lewis. If we don’t re-evaluate past regrets in light of present-day achievement or happiness, then what happens is that we accumulate regrets, and they become like a thousand anchors, forever keeping us paddling just to stay in place. They pull us back and forth, and we are never master of our own lives.

No, to look at things from our past that we regret and retelling that story in the context of who we are today, who we surround ourselves with today is a first step toward forgiving ourselves. That makes us more likely to forgive others.

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