You, Your Past and A New Beginning - You Can Do This.

If yesterday’s you met today’s you, would he be disappointed? The course of life would appear to be incredibly winding, is it possible that out of fatigue from the sheer grind of daily living today’s you left behind yesterday’s hopes and dreams? In the course of reaching for heaven, is it possible that you settled for a penthouse? You are still high up, but you look around and realize that a piece of you might forever never be actualized? Like bad sex, despite the fact that you appreciate that it happened, you know that it could have been so much better.

Tenacity is a trait that is remarkably in short supply, the need to follow the path of least resistance is as old as the universe itself, water flows over rocks seeking the softest corners, it curves its course by wearing them down, the same thing with human nature. Our course through life is often consumed by the present, hardly the hard past or the ambiguous future. The present represents a cumulative total of all that you have been up until now, all your mistakes, concessions, good fortune and hard work. The future is wide open you could still be whatever (yes, you can be president), the past should serve as a reservoir of dos and don’ts but in the end we use it for a dark cupboard where we hide our misdeeds, clandestine affairs, shameful experiences, failed projects, abandoned dreams and mismanaged opportunities.

People tend to haul the past around like an anchor bringing it like nuclear waste into their present, polluting everything. It sours your optimism, because your experience tells you it will not work, rather than you finding answers of what will work in the past, the past tells you to give up. The past colors your objectivity, making sure that you bring a bias into every situation regardless of its relevance. It’s strange that we carry so much of our history around with us but often do not reach into that closet to pull out encouragement for the present but rather excuses for our future. The other funny thing is that the past, the present and the future are all the same, one second ago was your past, and one second from now is your future, the decision you made a minute ago to is immediately affecting your present and invariable will have an effect in the future that will emerge from this present.

So if you were to meet the younger you, the one that ran to class with only one sock and tattered sandals, the one that dreamt of being a Nobel laureate, tell him, yes you have compromised, yes you have deviated from the path but tell him that you have seen the light and you will be back stronger and more determined than ever, that you will be a credit to him, because there is nothing that has happened that says you can’t be all that, Nelson Mandela become president at 79, you have a long way to go.