The Purpose of Past

I know without a doubt in this moment that the greatest act of courage is starting anew.  All that is old rises up against me in that moment of wanting to begin again - a tsunamic tidal wave set against my leaving behind the confines of the island of the past.  This idea of starting over is so cliche in our world today, and it is sentimentalized to such an extent, that there is virtually no awareness at all of the pain-staking determination, persistence, and effort required of the individual who knows that he can no longer remain who he has been up to this moment.

I know this to be true because I am working to start again right now.  Returning to this blog is an expression of that work.  I got a chuckle out of seeing some of the old things I wrote about on here.  Most of it seems to me to be naive, boring, and not too well focused.  Downright rambling and even embarrassing at times.  It seems I mistook this blog for a journal of sorts.  I was tempted to delete it all and start the blog over from scratch, but that would be a denial of who I have been, which, paradoxically, I have found to be the biggest stumblingblock to starting over.


For a true new beginning has nothing to do with resistance to, or escape of, the past.  God knows I've seen the evidence of this.  Each time I make a plan to begin again, I come to the end of that plan facing the very past I was seeking to escape when "I" originally hatched the plan.  I can see now that it was that past that gave birth to that plan in the first place.  And just as a child holds within her the characteristics and traits of her mother, so too does any plan borne of the need to get away from my past contain within it the seed of its creator.

So what is the answer for me?  I will find out for sure as I continue on, but this seems to get to the heart of it:  starting over is not about forgetting the past - becoming some sort of amnesiac through a new relationship, drugs, alcohol, useless activities and hobbies, new possessions, and/or new powers that merely distract me from who I am and have been.  Rather, it is about being awake to the moment to moment inner revelation of the workings of the past and its painful manifestations within and outside of me so that for this seeing, I am changed by that which gave me the sight.  Just as in any moment of insight, the past is not forgotten in me, but it is transformed into something new and greater through the full understanding of the nature that created that past. 

This is why all efforts by humanity (myself most definitely included) to escape the past have failed.  Because the past, and its pain, was never meant to be escaped but to be the very ground of what is new in this moment.  This also explains why a new beginning cannot be planned.

So, I will watch with intense focus and interest my development through this blog.  Simply pushing myself to write this post - because the weight of the past within me in this moment did not want me to make this effort - has already intensified this process of transformation within me.  For the past showed me that I never had anything worthwhile to say before, that some of my previous posts were boring or dumb or poorly written, so why go through this process again?  And I respond:

Because you don't want me to.