It’s probably not hard for you to reach back and pull to mind some messed up memories. Painful past experience that took your breath away in the worst way. But you can equally look at those past experiences and find most-beautiful moments of breathlessness that may have involved the same people. Well you, at least, were there for both. Experiences of incredible pain and experiences of incredible passion congeal, making up the fabric of your life that has thus far passed into memory.
Your memories hold weight, they hold substance, and they hold power. You can either let the weight of the past crush you or the fullness of the past lift you.
An easy example of changing your perspective and allowing the light of a past memory to assist you now is thinking of a past heartache. A past fallen relationship. It broke your heart, smashed you into millions of pieces… but were there not moments of a joy that seemed almost unrelenting? Yes. There were. That’s why the pain of the loss hurt as bad as it did.
We focus on that which we lost. Not that which we found in the process of creating something that we would ultimately never wish to lose. Instead, we focus on the loss. The loss was real. The loss was palpable. Even to this day. But so was the passion. The excitement. The love that will never, ever fade into nothing. My God, I loved that love that I once had.
Acknowledging the magnitude of all that was great from something that inevitably ended in disaster, does not draw me back to involving myself with a particular experience of brokenness in order to relive it, unless I let it. But rather, it allows me to enjoy the memories of the things that I most enjoyed from that shining encounter. My God, I loved that love that I once had.
This is not a sad admonition of lost love. Rather a joyous proclamation that I have met and know, and can call, Love, my friend. My wonderful friend that fills my heart.
We should do everything we can to snap ourselves from reverie and awaken to the moment. All peace can be found in the current moment you’re living. Thoughts dissolve when your focus falls on right now. But when you find yourself drifting to the past, if you can’t pull yourself back into the moment of now, at least acknowledge that every aspect of that past was not bad. There was some very good things mixed with some very bad. Focus on the good and then come back to the now-moment.
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