“. . . refuse to carry the corpse of a mistaken yesterday.” — Ernest Holmes
Over several recent conversations, an extremely close friend and I discussed how certain individuals . . . chose to embrace their failures, disappointments, mistaken choices, misdirected hurts, missed opportunities and elected irresponsibilities to color the tapestry of their present lives. As experienced in Dante’s, The Divine Comedy . . . it is as if they were given a walking tour of both heaven and hell, making the conscious choice of imprisonment. Think of it simply as, repeatedly re-living the mistakes of the past, by visiting a cemetery and being tied to what might have been, what could have been, but what is not. George Santayana put it very simply, “Habit is stonger than reason.”
Moving forward implies for some individuals, releasing the past, evaluating the present and sustaining the conciousness of who you really are. Which for some . . . is an extremely uncomfortable process, almost impossible. Facing yourself and acknowledging your failures promotes growth, maturity, honesty and character. This is not an exercise you can opt out of or sublimate easily, it is a required exercise… providing of course you’re conscious that the option for you even exists. Santayana clarifies this by stating, “You cannot create experience, you must undergo it.”
Evolving change is never easy, nobody said it was . . . given the circumstances that you may now find yourself. Your experience is a conscious choice of will, on how your attitudes color your continuing existence. As earlier stated, you can choose to experience walking through heaven or hell, thereby remaining imprisoned in your presnt reality. What do you want? Have you made an evaluation of what is not working in your life, or do you even care? No one can respond for you, although Lord Byron shapes another picture, “Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life, the evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.” Time places the balance of choice on the essence of our conscious existence, giving us an eternal opportunity, one grain of sand in measured life segments. JLR