For me, the past has passed. Most of it I try not to remember. Only specific experiences of my childhood can be identified as really good and happy. Things like camp, at the cottage and playing with my brother. I have few, if any, really concrete 'happy sensation' memories of my parents. Amazing to think I relied more on my brother than any other adult. I learned very early on that adults were not particularly reliable.
And yet, I have gone on to become a balanced and fairly emotionally stable adult. If I think too long on things past/passed, I begin to see the losses and murkiness that lays there. Instead I am choosing to take those things as 'lessons' and move forward. I revel knowing that my own children have reached an age where I had already learned about fear and let-downs, and they know none. All is stable. That alone I figure is worth something! I will never regret taking the time to build that foundation for them. Yet sometimes, often as I approach the date of my Mum's death, I think on the losses.
But today is the focus. The present and immediate future is not only something I can see, taste, feel and hear.... but also something over which I have control. Ironically, that need for control of self/emotions/situation/independance has come from those past lessons. For today I can choose to wear a smile. Today I noted that a tree on my block has changed colour. It turns the 'best' scarlet I have ever seen, year after year. I smile at the sweetness of my bestfriend's little boy as he plays cars contentedly. I smile at my luck to be healthy, with friends and a job I love.
The future is harder. For years, I have dreamed and felt sure I was not intended to make it past my early 30's. How weird eh? And yet, I have hit the mid 30's in one piece. Unlike so many people I struggle to imagine a future beyond professional goals for the next 10 years. I see a blank space. But now I have tasted the sweetness of happiness and love. I know it can find us anywhere and everywhere. My heart and soul and conscious being are open to life's little things. The past has passed, the present is here and being lived authentically, and the future.... may it bring only what I want most. Happiness.
