We cross and recross our tracks like figure skaters. Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness we birth our future. (c)
Almost a year has passed by now, these thoughts keep returning to me. Well, not exactly these ones, but the echo they left inside of me when they first sounded.
We meet, we part, we get to know each other not knowing what lies ahead, what will become of our lives, connections, friendships, fates. I'd actually rather not use this word, fate, it has this shade of inevitability, which I refuse to take in.
What does not cease to amaze me is the possibility of choosing the way we regard our past. Every moment of our life we find ourselves in a situation - however small and insignificant it may be - where we have to make choice. We create our future by doing this, quite true.
Has it ever occured to you we could also choose our past? Not only we set the tune to the music of our present, we are free to choose the prism through which to look at our past. We alter it all the time, polish, reset, or leave it rough so that no thing could sneak back through it into our present. We can't hold our past back, though. Neither can we stay away from making our future. The effect that follows negligence will get us sooner or later.
How do we change our past? We don't, it's the attitude and lessons learned that changes it. We might go back and read the lines that had been read. They will never sound the same, nor will we read it in a similar manner. But we may learn from it something we haven't noticed before.
It triggers in me another thought: it's an ever-changing world, really. Old news, you will say. Well, yes and no. "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man".
Perspectives change, places change, times change, why should we stay the same? Why would we want to?
Because it's safer, it's more conventional, it seems more reliable and it never really is. Everything changes and nothing is here to stay forever to serve our convenience, regardless of us being ready.
We choose. We decide. We are free to skate wherever we want to, whoever we want to be accompannied by. May it be across the paths already discovered or unknown ones, we may as well learn from both and looking back say we walked them thoroughly.
And what's more important, we will be able to look steadily and fearlessly at our future and know there are plenty of paths to be walked.
Almost a year has passed by now, these thoughts keep returning to me. Well, not exactly these ones, but the echo they left inside of me when they first sounded.
We meet, we part, we get to know each other not knowing what lies ahead, what will become of our lives, connections, friendships, fates. I'd actually rather not use this word, fate, it has this shade of inevitability, which I refuse to take in.
What does not cease to amaze me is the possibility of choosing the way we regard our past. Every moment of our life we find ourselves in a situation - however small and insignificant it may be - where we have to make choice. We create our future by doing this, quite true.
Has it ever occured to you we could also choose our past? Not only we set the tune to the music of our present, we are free to choose the prism through which to look at our past. We alter it all the time, polish, reset, or leave it rough so that no thing could sneak back through it into our present. We can't hold our past back, though. Neither can we stay away from making our future. The effect that follows negligence will get us sooner or later.
How do we change our past? We don't, it's the attitude and lessons learned that changes it. We might go back and read the lines that had been read. They will never sound the same, nor will we read it in a similar manner. But we may learn from it something we haven't noticed before.
It triggers in me another thought: it's an ever-changing world, really. Old news, you will say. Well, yes and no. "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man".
Perspectives change, places change, times change, why should we stay the same? Why would we want to?
Because it's safer, it's more conventional, it seems more reliable and it never really is. Everything changes and nothing is here to stay forever to serve our convenience, regardless of us being ready.
We choose. We decide. We are free to skate wherever we want to, whoever we want to be accompannied by. May it be across the paths already discovered or unknown ones, we may as well learn from both and looking back say we walked them thoroughly.
And what's more important, we will be able to look steadily and fearlessly at our future and know there are plenty of paths to be walked.
