Unpacking Past Experience
When it comes to our past experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant, we often endeavor to examine them in order to create confluence within our present lives. It is perhaps one of my strongest opinions that we are simply determined in our present state, by our past choices and decisions. This is to say that all the judgements and experiences that led up to our current sense of being are the most important and impactful within understanding ourselves as humans. The end result is really quite simple, as there is an additive property within life, as we slowly accrue these experiences and make decisions surrounding them. However, we eventually come to a point in our lives where reflection is not only warranted, but necessary in order to progress within our lives. We often feel this urge to reflect upon our past choices after traumatic or significant changes within our lives, and for many of us, this lands us in the caring hands of a counselor. We look externally for help with understanding our inner goings on, and for many this is a very successful endeavor. My personal experience with counselors is somewhat mixed, and I believe that there is a great deal that we can do from our own living rooms and porches.
Now, I want to be perfectly clear, I am in no way decrying modern therapy or psychology, rather acknowledging them as possible tools to help drive your progress within yourself. One of the major issues that I see with these institutions is that they rely on unpacking the past in order to understand the present and future versions of yourself. By experiencing the past, you feel a wide variety of emotions, some of which are not entirely productive in the process of self examination. By talking about past experiences we gain wisdom from ourselves, but we must remain cognisant that we are only the present versions of ourselves. We are inherently not the same people that we are viewing with the lense of retrospect, rather we are evovled versions of ourselves with different outlooks and attitudes on our lives than our past selves. Our emotions and feelings can also become disturbed within this process bringing forward parts of ourselves that we had hoped to have left in the trash bins of our past lives.
It is also quite easy in fact to get swallowed up by past emotions, as it is so simple as a human to live within the past. Simply by looking through a stack of photographs, we can often experience the emotions evoked by them and within them. It is this power as humans, that we can elicit emotion by living through memory, that we often extend ourselves into places of memory and fantasy. In the same way we also extrapolate into the future versions of ourselves, trying to anticipate that which is to come within our lives. This complex amalgamation of thought can simply be referred to as anxiety. When in these moments of relection and posturing, we must remember that we are the present versions of ourselves, and nothing else. We grow and change, minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day, and it is this the understanding that must permeate our subconscious. By dealing with these emotions as they crop up, within our present and conscious self, it is my belief that we allow the possibility of great growth and self healing.
By dealing with your past through your present self, you address things in a more step by step basis as you continue to forge authenticity within your life. Each interaction within our lifetimes will be unique to the present moment that we are in at the present time, so why not interpret it with that lens? We are too often governed by memories of the past, and anxieties of the future. We must consciously take control of these moments and emotions within the present, which is truly the only opportunity that we have to address them. Take conscious control of your present, and it will become easier to plan for the unplanned. As we become more grounded within our present conscious lives, our ability to unpack the past becomes simply a part of our development into our most authentic beings.
