Letting It Be

Do you wish you could leave the past behind? Really leave it behind. Just walk forward without dragging it along like a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe?

I do.

Of course, despite all the talk these days about leaving 'smaller footprints', it's quite impossible not to leave some evidence of where you've been, but how about not bringing so much of that dust into the next room with you; or into the next moment?

It's an Eastern idea that negative emotional memory tends to accumulate in our cells and our organ systems: anger being stored in the liver, sadness in the lungs, stress in the stomach... fear in the kidneys. (Hey, where do the positive emotions go?) And as usual, we westerners seem hell bent on proving that we are the best at stockpiling it.

We drag that dust along for a variety of reasons - lack of awareness, incomplete processing of experiences, fear of change, the need to make others feel guilty, and plain old denial or a refusal to accept things.

Isn't it funny that refusal to accept something should bind us to it? 

Or, that what we become attached to should desert us?

What if things are neither here nor there? What if it's just our wanting them to be here too much that makes them seem far away; or our pushing them away that makes them seem so threateningly close?

No amount of rationalizing will completely quell the urge to seek what we want and resist what we don't want - but when we get stuck, letting things be as they are might be the only reliable way forward.

AP Photo/dapd, Winfried Rothermel