Remember Your Past
Weekly Reading Topic for July 27, 2019: Remember Your Past
Well, good morning, love!
I just opened a Reading for you, my newsletter subscribers and here’s what I heard in answer to the following:
What do my readers most need to hear this weekend? What is the most important message to send to my beloved readers?
The answer was: “Remember Your Past.”
I feel loose as a goose now! What follows is your Weekly Reading.
Weekly Reading │ Remember Your Past
Q: What do you mean, “remember your past?”
A: There is a lot here, so let’s see if we can make sense of it.
OK. You know how sometimes it feels as if you are a brand new person when you look back over your life? When you think about who you were last year, ten years ago, twenty years ago, you could almost believe you were a completely different person?
And at the exact same time, you see that what made you SEEM like a different person is really that you had weird habits of mind that you’ve dropped since? Or that you used to see the world in a different way, but in the intervening years have come to a new understanding?
There’s a passage in the bible which I will NOT be able to quote perfectly, but it starts something like this:
“When I was a child, I thought as a child.”
It goes on from there, but the most important part for us to look at closely now [literally] is that child mind, thinking.
Even last year’s mind, for you, is a child’s mind in this context. Last week’s mind. Yesterday’s mind. Last hour’s mind.
Our mind has a profound ability to adapt and change based on experiences.
It does this whether we are conscious of it or not. (Indeed, we are almost never conscious of the changes as they happen.)
So, in that way, our mind is an ever-learning child mind. And that is brilliant!
And yet, interestingly, it’s also true that as we gain more and more experiences, and find more and more nuances in the world because of those experiences, we ALSO become more and more childlike.
Some of us embrace this. We let our experiences soften us, make our opinions more tenuous, our absolutes less rigid. We incorporate experiences into our mindset and allow them to change the black-and-whites to grayscale, the stark and vivid colors to a palette that includes muted and pastel tones. We become more open-minded and allow the world to surprise again, to delight us, again, as if we are once more that five-year-old staring up at the wrinkles on our dear one’s face, wondering who drew those lines and what kind of pencil they used.
We let ourselves laugh at things we find funny, again. To say “I love you,” just because we feel it. To follow the unexpected and whimsical right into a moment of play.
And the rest of us don’t do this … yet still, become more childlike. We fight to maintain our hard edges, even as they crumble from years of rubbing against the world. We insist that our eyes see sharp lines, even though we need readers to make it even somewhat true. We clench our fists and harden our minds against the new, against the change, against the Way Things Are Now.
And so we are also made childlike, because the world, as it moves around us, leaves us, sitting there on our park benches, shaking our canes at the pigeons. The world smiles if we are lucky and smirks if we are not, but either way, it dismisses us, like a mother ignoring a toddler’s temper tantrum. Because the world does not stop for our tantrums, ever. It always went on, and it always will, bending and weaving and shaping a dance so intricate, so winding, that no straight line even exists in it, not even in the mental world, not even in the theoretical world.
So the magical child and the miserable child live in us, and in some of us, only one is fully awake. In most of us, though, that magical child and that miserable child take turns peeking out the window of our eyes.
So this weekend, it’s time to look at our pasts and see how we were once children, and how the world changed us or didn’t change us, and how we are still children, today, and will become more so as we go on.
And we have to decide: do we drop the pretenses of adulthood? Do we stand in truth and speak simply, and clearly, so that no one misunderstands us?
Or do we play games with words, politicize our speech and the speech of everyone else, bemoaning the choices made, complicating the world, adding more sound, less meaning?
Do we keep our head above water and our mind clear, so we can see what is Actually Happening and What Needs to Be Done?
Or do we dive down into our despair and mourning, and bleat about how Life Isn’t Fair and Should Change?
[Either choice is OK, by the way, as long as you commit. It’s when we don’t recognize the choice we are making that we actually lose control. Having a good temper tantrum once in a while is a great way to clear the mind, so you can go back to being the Magical Child who Loves What Is! It’s only when you get stuck in the tantrum that you suffer needlessly — and make the rest of us suffer even more.]
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We are able to, now, become children again in a soul-satisfying, beautiful way. Think of your favorite four-year-old. Think of how he or she is able to distract themselves — is totally willing to be distracted from pain. Yes, when he falls, he cries out. She screams when she gets frustrated. But offer a kind word or make a silly face, and the tears sparkle on the corners of a smiling mouth.
Remember your past means this: look back over your life, and chart some of your major change times. Take a look at how they moved you one way or the other. And feel in your body the impact of those changes, and ALSO how those changes have served your life today.
If something feels overwhelming, get help with that. Because now is the time for us all to flex our cat-like reflexes. If we needed to, we could all adapt to just about anything. And if we need to, we are all capable of doing a LOT more to affect our world than we normally do.
Now is the time when clear voices speaking sense and compassion must be heard. And the way that happens is that when you feel yourself speaking, you open your mouth wider. Let out the words. It’s the only way the changes we want will come. Say the simple thing that is inside you.
We must, now, turn our attention to What Is and What We Want, and start relentlessly, endlessly, ceaselessly, speaking it. The child in our past who said “I want ice cream,” or “I want a dog,” and knew that eventually, it would come — that is the part of ourselves we must call forth now.
That confidence, that play, is what we need most.
I hope you can feel the power that is here, the simple, focused power.
Because these times are still pretty Windy, aren’t they? And we mustn’t let ourselves be blown about. We must know, at least for ourselves, what we want and how we want it.
It’s time to do as children do: get bored with being bored and boring, think up a new Thing to Do, and then set about building the sets and picking the parts and telling everyone we know when the Play Will Begin.
Sell tickets, it’s going to be FANTASTIC!!
But only if we lose the stiff and adopt the flex. Only if we remember this advice when we lay down at night: “the more you relax, the more support you receive.”
Relax, and receive, and speak and play and make plans. Now is the time!
I am always here to serve in any way I can.
Much Love to You,
Molly
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