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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.

The Power of Quiet

Years ago, University of Alabama writing professor Michael Martone asked me to contribute to an essay collection of writers giving advice to other writers. It was called Rules of Thumb. The title of my essay was “Just Shut Up.’

In it, I used a whole lot of words to tell writers, especially those just starting, that sometimes talking about your ideas, your plans, and your very grandiose intentions can kill your creativity. Storytelling is an impulse and once you’ve told your story to every Tom, Dick and writing coach, you may not need to create that book. You’ll be staring at your computer screen wondering just when you lost interest. So just shut up. Be quiet. Go with God.

It occurs to me that the same advice is useful to people in so many areas of their life.

We always advise other people to think before they speak. Forget about thinking before you speak. Just don’t speak before you speak. As a friend of mine used to say, hit the pause button, take a breath and let your brain and your mouth become synchronized. You might discover that you don’t need to say anything at all. I think I have prevailed in a lot of arguments by letting the other person talk themselves out to the point of exhaustion. In a way, I refuse to let the argument happen. If I don’t respond, are you really arguing with me? Could be you’re just spewing a lot of carbon dioxide.

Some of us want to beat people down with words. Some of us spend a lot of time trying to convince those who just will not budge. They are their argument and you are yours. It’s a verbal shoving match. So bless their hearts and quietly let them go.

Sometimes this means letting people think that they have won these non-arguments. Sometimes this means letting people think that they silenced you. But it’s okay. Remember what Abraham Lincoln said: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

We admire people who can articulate, argue a point, speechify and preachify. But quiet is also a superpower.

The Help

I need help.

This quiet thought came to me as I was recently lying on my dining room floor with my head wedged between two pieces of furniture. I had fallen out of my wheelchair and my disability would not allow me to rescue myself from this very uncomfortable position.

Although it had been a while since I had been in such a predicament, it was very, very familiar. Before I gave in to the wheelchair, hard falls were a frequent occurrence. When my symptoms started affecting my limbs about six years ago, I stumbled along until I gave into a walker. Then I slowly made my way around by basically dragging my unresponsive legs behind me. I didn’t get anywhere quickly, and often I never made it at all because my legs just wouldn’t GO. And I would hit the floor or the ground and have to call for help.

The firemen and EMTs from Fire Station 18 started greeting me like an old friend.

Thus, the wheelchair and my introduction to the caregiving industry. This neediness was a hard and bitter pill to swallow. Help getting bathed and dressed, out of bed and into bed, getting meals, and going anywhere. My life no longer seems to be in any way my own. And how I managed to tumble out my 400-pound power wheelchair still baffles me.

I was rescued from my painful and undignified predicament on the dining room floor when my caregiver came in later that afternoon. I am lucky to have such skilled and caring people in my life nowadays. And there were no lasting injuries from that fall. But still, it hurts, emotionally and mentally. Scar tissue is starting to form. One of the ways this manifests itself is that you start pulling back from anything that’s going to be potentially painful or difficult. You just get tired of being a problem.

I get through it somehow. We all fall. Each of us is probably a problem for someone, whether we know it or not. We are a burden to this world.

I need help. So do we all.

Songs From the Dead

At its core, this blog is an attempt to understand and implement the power of resiliency. I’m sure I can find the dictionary definition of that word, but what does it mean really?

I spent a lot of time trying to boil it down, and I decided that resiliency means trust. No matter what happens, do I trust that it will not defeat me? No matter what happens, do I trust that the love I feel is real, even when I feel pummeled by my losses? Do I trust that death, the loss of the destination at which to aim yourself, a loss of your health, the death of your work, is not the end of Life? And, yes, I capitalize Life on purpose.

When I lived with my Beloved, I often woke to the sound of him singing. He was Muslim, and every morning before dawn he chanted prayers. It’s a lovely sound to awaken to. He had other songs as well, including unintentionally hilarious freestyle raps, but it’s this song to God that I miss most now that he’s gone.

Before he died, I never gave much thought to the songs of dead singers. Yes, I remember the deaths of people like Marvin Gaye (shot by his father), Tammi Terrell (brain tumor), and Donny Hathaway (out the window). Most recently, Aretha Franklin (cancer) was silenced. But the music was the thing. But since the death of my Beloved, when I hear a song from those who are gone, new meaning emerges. What does it mean when songs of life are delivered to me from dead lips?

In a way, my Beloved’s end was the beginning of a major downhill slide for me. Even though I had been suffering symptoms of multiple sclerosis for four years by the time he left me, it was after he killed himself that what had been merely inconvenient became frightening. And more frightening still was opening my eyes in the mornings, alone in that bed, listening for his voice.

But he was gone and I began falling. In the kitchen while cooking dinner. In the hallway while trying to get to the bathroom. In the bedroom and lying on the floor all night. In my office, twisting my leg under a piece of furniture and fracturing it. What does resiliency mean in the face of this kind of disability? What does it mean when your heart has been torn out and your body has given way?

There’s a song on one of my playlists by Donny Hathaway: A Song for You. I’m always a huge, grieving knot by the time it ends. The dead have gone we know not where, and we have all been transformed. I may yet become a mystic who swims, but the lessons have only begun and the water is cold.