Be Here Now
Where we are right now in time is simply the place between the events that have happened before this moment — the past — and all those things that are yet to happen –the future. Many magazine articles, life coaches, self-help books, and even religions encourage us to live in the now. This can be more difficult than we expect it to be, especially if something in the present triggers us to look back towards events that occurred in our past. Often the events we are invited to relive are ones for which still bring up a large amount of anger, resentment, or sorrow.
It can be difficult to look back with 20/20 vision. Our younger self may not have clearly understood what was happening to us. Feeling all of our feelings is healthy. What’s not healthy is becoming stuck in hopelessness or blame. It’s normal to still feel the pain of difficult past events, but if we choose to be blinded by a haze of blame or despair whenever we think about a particular negative event from our past, it becomes more likely that event will rewound us any time we revisit it. Picking at an emotional scar and reopening it without cleaning out old residue can make it difficult for the original wound to ever truly heal. It also makes it next to impossible to learn from the past.
Fear often suggests that something reminiscent of a negative occurrence from our past that is happening in our present is proof that we can expect that particular type of situation to continue to happen in our lives. It doesn’t matter whether fear tells us that we’ll always be unloved, or taken advantage of, or at the mercy of others, it will attempt to convince us that the incident in question isn’t one small story from our life but is actually the entire story of our life. Instead of viewing the past through the additional personal growth we’ve achieved, we may make the unfortunate choice to use past pain to distort how we see the present.
Since we don’t like feeling the negative emotions associated with particular negative events from the past we may overreact or retreat into ourselves in the present. We may end up convincing ourselves that throwing big emotion at others means we are standing up for ourselves. It can often seem easier to feel and express anger towards others or to give into general despair than to come face-to-face with our own fears and explore them. Fear also may invite us to believe making a fuss about what’s happening now makes up for what we couldn’t or didn’t do in the past. The truth is that this misplaced emotion merely serves to distance us from what’s happening here and now and from exploring what happened in the past to learn more about ourselves. We feel justified about our over-the-top negative reactions and defend our right to have them. We don’t recognize them as a stand-in for our unprocessed past emotions.
If we stay stuck nursing our negative feelings, if we don’t disengage and begin to explore an unpleasant experience from our past using our intellect, experiential knowledge, intuition, or instincts, we may end up postponing or missing the opportunity to learn from our past. When we choose to hyper focus on negative past events we may also allow these same negative emotions to color our perception of the future. We may begin to worry that past events will always be repeated in undesirable ways. If we focus strongly on these fears we may begin to feel as if we are pre-inhabiting the dystopian future we fear. We might even cause ourselves to miss out on putting our energy into creating the future we want or into enjoying the present.
