There comes a day when we have to stop using our past as an excuse for who
we are in the present. Past is supposed to be accepted. Many a times, it does
seem that we have accepted it. It does seem that we have made peace with who we
have become because of our past. And, if it is bad we do hope to take charge of
what we do now, because we do not want to blame our today for the things we do
in future.
True that. But the haunting question is, what do we do with
our past where we weren’t the protagonists? What if, our past has been
entertaining others with its limelight? We were not backstage and we had no role
to play apart from being an audience. We laughed when the acts got funny and we
cried when grief took over. And, every time we had the stage to ourselves, we
thought about what the acts of others left us with. We didn’t have the brain to analyse it. We missed a few shows at times, perhaps,
escaped the theatre because we didn’t know how to live just as a
mute audience.
It is then, that past cannot be escaped in present. The
rare moments we spent on stage, with no audience and no backstage help, left us
with enough time to deal with how we felt, not knowing really what we felt.
Sometimes in present we cannot make sense of what we say and why we say it.
We just do, and if we think about it, it takes us back to very specific moments
in the past. It may be a particular day or a particular thought that we failed
to make sense of. But in the end, we began believing in a version of ourselves
that had nothing to do with us. We began living a life, purely based on the
choices and decisions made by characters on stage, the ones we saw growing up,
the ones we heard and to be honest, childhood then doesn’t seem as pretty as we
try to romanticize it.
What do we do? Forgetting the past is never an option unless
we want to do it Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind way. Even if we do do that, then it would be an endless cycle
of similar events. To live with past, I strongly believe, is difficult. It
affects us, every day as an adult. Are we making a decision because we want it
or are we making it because of what happened to us in the past? Who would we be had those particular events not been a part of us, and we actually
had the choice to make what we want to make of our life, where the lime light
never goes away from us?
Wait! "Aren’t we protagonists of our lives now, as
adults?" Let’s not get into that. It’s not easy to live as an underprivileged muggle for eleven years and suddenly accept the amazing life of a wizard. No, that doesn’t make sense. Even Harry Potter needed a parallel world to be who he wants to be, or rather has always been. We are mere muggles stuck in one world with our past.We have no escape. We try to make our
present better if past was any good. If we turn out to be great, probably we wouldn’t even look back.
What about the moments when we break down, just a little, and nothing makes
sense? There are times when we think that we have accepted our past is like
water, we need it but we can shape it by putting it into vessels of our choice.
Somewhere, don’t we know that it doesn’t add up?
I hope for a better world, I am an optimist that way even if
I prefer to stay a realist for the most part. My realism tells me that we make
peace with the past, and if we don’t then we don’t. No matter what state of
mind we are in, we just stay that way. The optimist in me says that we make the
best of today. The past left its scars, but it doesn’t have to rule the day.
How naïve! I think, these are two easy ways out. The difficult is the third
one, where I feel that past haunts us because it needs to be acknowledged. If
we had a great yesterday, do we thank people who made it so amazing, do we thank
ourselves for being a fabulous person? If we had a bad one, do we talk
to people associated with it? Are we brave enough to tell them how something
has affected us, something in which they had a role to play? Do we try to get a
closure, before accepting things are the way they are?
I am not saying that talking or any other form of
acknowledgement helps deal with ghosts of past. There are a few maybe(s)
though. Maybe if we acknowledge, then it won’t repeat itself. The people
associated with it might deny the existence of such a past, their memory of it might be entirely different. But maybe, just maybe, they will understand that
realities of two people in the same situation can be poles apart. Maybe, they
will understand that psyche of a person varies from another, they will
acknowledge your version of past even if they do not accept it, and maybe that
will make all the difference.
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| Source: www.alamy.com |
We know how we want our past to be in this present. We do not
need a time machine to fix that, we have a subconscious mind. If we think about
something for long enough, we might start believing in it. All we can do today
is decide what we want to think about. It just has
to be this moment where we believe in ourselves even with a haunting past and a
scary future. And, maybe someday we will stop thinking about the one thing that
we never understood, the one that never made any sense. Our brain, in the end,
is perhaps like a prism. We can throw our present into it, and it will refract
different pasts, each with its own effect which no matter what resulted in the
light in us, or may be the darkness.
It is a matter of perspectives, after all!
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