#4. The past.
Updated: Feb 15, 2022
The Change. #1 - Before
In determining what is and what is not important to discuss from one’s life, a certain amount of thought has to go into exactly what is the past?
Many people will divulge from theirs that which only serves to elevate them, speaking of the past in glowing terms to alleviate the truth of what it really was. They do this because they don't want the past to weigh them down, to remove them from the present moment. It also serves that one element of humanity which we all carry, the ego.
Others will hold onto their pain and take security in possession of it, almost as if it is their identity. This is their ego too.
I have all of that in my past, same as everyone else, all to varying degrees of course but all still under the banner of life, of the experience in the third dimension of consciousness. (I'll talk more about that later.)
The point is we all have a past, none of which is present in this very moment, the now. But we reach back using our memories, or emotions felt at that time and relive them to some degree.
I find it important to remember and remind myself often that we do not live in the past, nor in the future ... we live in the now.
We share our past in our own thoughts or with friends, family and enemies of old. We may rejoice, admonish, curse or cry but they are always there, lingering subjectively in the back of our minds.
And, as time wears, those memories become fainter and more convoluted as the true memory goes just as the moment did and we are left with those details we consider relevant, or have made relevant in our egos.
It's nice to remember, to have the ability to recall. It's also nice to share that with others who are on their journey too ... something I believe still exists.
I met an man once who had spent his life working on cattle farms as a drover, moving from camp to camp, farm to farm working the land wherever the work was, for all his life. He'd travelled all over Australia doing this, I asked him was it intentional , did he have a plan to explore the whole country from the outset.
He said no, that it never even occurred to him, he was just spending his life in the moment, working the land best he could by day and telling a tale by night.
He would recite poems from memory, some ten to fifteen minutes long. They were stories of the land, sharing the knowledge of it, the joys and the blunders, the devastation and creation.
This was the way of the old, of the first men that came to this country. It was the way of the original peoples of this land too. We go walk, we meet and we talk about things.
The past, and our stories about them, serve as a guide, both in for what to do now and as a reference point for what comes next. Sometimes we realise the importance of little signs helping guide us along the way, if we dig deep enough to notice ... othertimes something dramatic needs to happen in order for us to see them.
So what bears relevance in my past to tell you, well, for a start I would say I was a zombie right up until I had that crash. I was wandering through life feeling like I didn't get it. I felt directionless, numb and completely oblivious.
Despite the heavy amount of travel I had done up till about the age of thirty something was being held back, something was missing. Almost as if I had the training wheels on the whole time and was too scared to take them off out of fear and this resulted in a misunderstanding of who I was.
The writer in me was always there. Kids are raised on stories and my childhood was no different. Problem was I actually couldn't read properly until I was eleven, despite the fact that I wrote my first book when I was ten.
I was fortunate enough to have a teacher who noticed and started by reading in class a book called the Hatchet. It was the first time I connected word with thought and understood a book. Thereafter I moved onto small stories by Paul Jennings and improved my reading abilities. My teacher never relented, always followed up on books to try and even when I moved to a new class always asked me what I was reading.
I wrote a few more books up until I hit puberty, the change that time period created saw me leave the hobby behind for a few years. After school it came back to me again, I enrolled in a writers course, started poetry and even a new novel. That lasted all of about five minutes before I gave it up too.
Life then caught me up and I never wrote anything of note, excluding some blogging I did while travelling. The writing was on the wall, all the signs I needed to see were there but as I mentioned earlier ... I was a zombie and I couldn't see them.
Because I just didn't get it ...