Connecting to the Past

Life is funny. Sometimes it creates a window to your past. In this window you can see and be connected to a part of your life that you thought was long gone. You can visit the past, but you are just a voyeur. Your life is plainly on YOUR side of the wall.

Sometimes life creates a door to your past. You can actually walk through – be a moving and changing part of it. You can actually complete unfinished business and make not so happy page breaks, into a story with a happy ending.

However, sometimes life only creates a picture of your past that can only be hung on a very secure wall of the present. You can look at it, but you can’t effect it.

It takes wisdom to see what you are actually looking at. Wisdom comes with age, but visiting the past sometimes removes that age-given wisdom. Instead, it takes you back to a pre-wisdom place.

Life isn’t so funny after all.

7 comments:

Jodi said...

Um...Jeff? I didn't understand that at all. Can you decode? Hope you're doing well.

J.

Jeff said...

I don't know what to tell you, Hoosier Girl. If you don't get it, then it may not apply to you. I wrote it in a way that people can examine their own lives and see where it fits (or where it HAS fit). If you never have a "visit" from the past, then maybe that is the way it is supposed to be in your life. I know someone who NEVER wants any connection with her past at all.

Brian said...

I think I get it. The unfortunate thing is, you don't know the windows open until you've already felt the blast of cold air from it. Glad to see you're rejuvenating your blog as well.

Sometimes it can be good, a wakeup call, but lots of times for me, it just brings up painful memories.

Jeff said...

Brian: I am trying. I have a lot of stuff popping up now and daring me to rejuvenate it.

I know what you mean about it being a big risk for painful memories. However, sometimes it is no risk/no gain. That doesn't mean we should be fool-hardy. As far as your "blast of cold air" . . . yeah. Sometimes we are subjected to be a victim of the sniper.

Michelle said...

I love this one. Jeff. :-)

In 2001 my life became a weird "This was your life" TV show. I bumped into old friends and had to go back and look at old events over and over. It stopped for a while, but last year it returned again.

At the moment my past is a soap opera on TV I'm watching and thinking... "How corny and sad... and yet you believed this real and was so important." :-\

Amel said...

Interesting post, Jeff. There are times when I visited the past and it made me feel like the person I was back then, not the me I am now and it always makes me feel uncomfy. But I don't think I've ever been able to pass through a door to my past to change it.

bzascanb said...

Doors can offer security. Pictures can be pretty. Open windows can offer clear views & refreshing breezes.