Shining the Light
by
, 02-20-2012 at 08:22 PM (1328 Views)
The Past isn't a concrete thing, even though we tend to think of it as such. There is no place where your past deeds, missed opportunities, or transcendent experiences exist. The Past only exists in our minds, in our memories and in our written records.
Using the past to judged who you are in the present, who you will be or what your future holds is fallacious in a major way. In order to understand why this is, we need to understand the nature of light.
Light works in mysterious ways - light is white, purely colorless but contains all primary colors. We interpuret light as color because objects absorb light and only allow certain colors to be emitted that your eye can process. This is why grass is green and the sky is blue.
In astronomy we use this in something called spectrometry, where we see the emission lines of light. The best way to understand spectrometry is by the stars. Our Sun is yellow because of the gas the radiation, or 'light' as we know it, is passing through from the core. Same as why we also observe some stars as blue or red. The gas the light passes through retains some of the 'spectrum' of colors in light thus only letting yellow, blue or red light to pass through it and out into space.
So, the type of gas that light passes through will change the color in which we percieve the light. In this sense our memories work the same. When we shine a light on our past and remember events, people, situations and circumstance, that light of remembrance passes through the gas of feelings. Our past, in our minds, are colored by our interpretation of the past - and as such we can never really have a true understanding of the past in a holistic sense.
Our past is hued by our unmet expectations, joys, fears, concerns or losses - this is why it's a terrible candidate to judge who you are, or what you will be. The best thing we can learn to do for ourselves, in order to get perspective is to shift the focus of emotions on our past, in order to see it in a new light. This is why past experiences seem different to us as we get older; the sting of betrayal lessens, the youthful joy of a first love fades. But, even this only allows us to view the past in different ways, not holistically accurate.
I hope that each and every one of you that reads this understands, in no way does your past make who you are today or in the future - for it is just as fantastically imaginary as a unicorn or a dragon. The only thing that matters is what you do right now.
We don't live life by leaps and bounds, we live it step by step; moving from our past into our future. Only in hindsight does life move fast, in the present it moves second by second. Live life by the second and your present will be fulfilling and your past will seem adventurous.