Looking in the Rear View Mirror

I was invited to attend my high school 50^th class reunion this summer, but I have declined to attend. Somewhere along the way I received sound advice to never attend a class reunion because of the shock you receive when you discover just how old those you mentally remember as being the same age as you have  become. I've logged nearly 68 years on this planet and my self image is not ready to perceive itself as old yet. I'd much rather toe the line at some challenging foot race with a bunch of energetic thirty- and forty-somethings who I mentally perceive as my peers.

It is a bad idea to spend much time looking in the rear-view mirror of life. Those friends and family that re-live the old stories again and again, living according to the way things used to be or how they fondly remember it, are the ones accelerating into old age and infirmity – not a place I am in any hurry to arrive.

Memories alter perception – greatly – so I am very cautious about spending much time in the past. Wasting time to constantly affirm reality from ideas about what once was or what happened before takes energy away from the magical alchemy of the ever-present now. Most of the time the world is shifting so fast that I find I must pay strict attention just to maintain any semblance of coherence; there is no time to further re-process the past, even the immediate past. There is no need to constantly be clearing all the hurts and traumas or re-celebrating the accomplishments of bygone times.

Each moment, I am aware of moving into a brand new frame of reference, enabling me to change the person I am. I can't reinvent myself if I am stuck in the past. Living fully in the pregnant moment, there is no need to heal the past. It is much easier to let the past go; it's gone anyway, so I just let it quickly dissipate from my mental focus. 

I was born into a perfect world, a child of God, living forever in a glorious field of grace. What is there to fix? Life is a purposeful, meaningful experience and everything is just the way it was created to be.

All that really exists is the eternal moment of now.  We have to take time away from focusing on that moment to create the past out of the now. Recreating the past with memories is distracting. There is no need to look back except perhaps to appreciate how far you have come.

If I were to attend my class reunion I would have to look in the faces of old acquaintances and tell them that the old me no longer exists. I am no longer that me and they are no longer what I remember them to be.  We are strangers left to regurgitate well-digested and distorted memories, otherwise. 

I'm always in the process of creating a new me. I am ever manifesting myself as a new idea.  My objective is to keep growing forward, onward and upward, constantly defining and re-defining what it is that I prefer to be with clear intention, clear self-validation, and clear action.