When life hurts, when it gets too complicated, it is natural to want to go back to the good ol’ days, to want to make things like they were, or at least how the mind remembers they were. Its human to think back then it couldn’t have been this bad.
It’s funny, the mind rarely remembers accurately — is there an accurate? I don’t think so. What we remember has all to do with who we perceived ourselves to be at the time, how we thought the world was and which opportunity or risks we were facing. It has nothing to do with how others saw it, or how we actually experienced it.
That memory of better times is but a flash in the pan that no longer exists. How can you go back to that? Hmmm … why is it we tend to memorialize the good and stuff the bad, unless of course the bad was so bad as to defy forgetting?
That ache to return, the pull to be like we were, is basically a way that we resist what’s here now, no different from how we did back when. Life was never good enough. We forget that. We don’t remember the mindset, the model of the world we were living then, the layers of complexity we covered the simplicity with and called life.
And then, if we are truly self-focused … we project it even further out, casting the net to cover experience in general, making it the way life was for all.
My parents didn’t lock the doors when I was growing up, not until a friend’s son was murdered, and then the doors remembered they came with locks. All that time I came and went without a key, people in the same little southern Oregon town, weren’t living the same reality. Their fears weren’t dreamland shadows, their neighborhoods not quite so safe.
I always wonder whose past those who want to go back want to return to. It couldn’t be mine, a world where women were second class citizens, where the idea of going to college was seen as a way to get a husband, where women couldn’t get their own credit or buy a house. No … that’s not the world that shines so brightly that it magnetizes us to return? Is it?
It was simpler then … if you look simply at choices, if you don’t take into consideration the blood, sweat and tears that went into the fight, so many back-alley abortions, all the sore feet and broken hearts, lives of wasted potential, and the hopelessness and depression that went hand in hand with the struggle.
Or perhaps you want to go back even further to times of Lords and serfs — spoiler alert — the lord positions are already filled. They are always already filled.
Time travel sounds like fun, doesn’t it, but time travelling to the 50’s or earlier, while living in 2023, doesn’t sound so great.
Luckily I realized that It doesn’t get better than This. There is no place and time other than now. Nowness, hereness, thisness is all there is — well not is exactly, but you know, words.
As long as I/we think there is, it will look like there is a way out — either forward into that mythical better tomorrow or backwards into a past that never existed as we remember.
It’s all illusion … whether it’s toxic or a remedy for what hurts is part of the illusion. It’s kind of cool though, the myriad ways This looks, that it takes shape and form, that the same thing is interpreted as being good or bad or blissful or evil.
I find it more than fascinating. How about you?
There is no appropriate bio for Amaya Gayle. She doesn’t exist other than as an expression of Consciousness Itself. Talking about her in biographical terms is a disservice to the truth and to anyone who might be led to believe in such nonsense. None of us exist, not in the way we think. Ideas spring into words. Words flow onto paper and yet no one writes them. They simply appear fully formed. Looking at her you would swear this is a lie. She’s there after all, but honestly, she’s not. Bios normally wax on about accomplishments and beliefs, happenings in time and space. She has never accomplished anything, has no beliefs and like you was never born and will never die. Engage with Amaya at your own risk. That said with a giggle, check out Amaya’s new book – Actuality: infinity at play, available in paperback and e-book at Amazon.