It’s All in Your Head

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. ― William Faulkner

Most of us think about our past. At some point, we are going to regret it, or revere it, tell stories about it, or try to hide our part in it. People ask us to relive it in the interest of getting to know us. We fill out forms about our work history, our medical history, our educational history. Society demands, and we allow, the dead hand of the past to define us. We are led through life by a phantom.

The past is all memory, which means it’s all thought.

Have you ever had the experience of remembering some event but having your friends recall it differently? Even though you shared the same space and same time, their thoughts are not your thoughts. What they stored in their brains about that shared moment ain’t how you saw it.

That thing that you usually refer to as your life is all memory. It really is all in your head.

However.

Despite what all the mindfulness proponents keep emphasizing, there is evidence of the existence of the past. It is in us.

We are alive today with bits and pieces of past people swimming around in our very bloodstream. We are alive today because they were alive then, so is it not true that the past lives right here with us?

Indeed, I wrote a whole novel based on the premise that history is alive in our hearts and our minds and our bodies. We inherited how we view the world. The world inherited how it sees us. No matter how fast we run, the dogs of the past are at our heels like bloodhounds on the trail.

Can we get away from it? Should we?

Here’s what I believe. The well-known quote above by Faulkner rings true. Our knowledge of how the past affects our thoughts and actions today, give us a framework from which to shape our lives in the present. We don’t have to be servants of the past, but we are fools if we don’t acknowledge the weight of it. And guess what? A lot of us are fools. How many times have you heard someone say “that was so long ago; why can’t you just forget about all that?”

It seems as if the world wants us to forget so that we remain ignorant of our true power. Because knowledge is rooted in the past; that’s the only place you can go and get some of that and I’m gonna get it – because I need it.

Learn from the past and live in the present. Today – yes today – I am what the past made me. And thank God and the ancestors it is so.