shared past

Going down someone else's memory lane is telling not just about them but about ourselves. Their story can offer a point of reference for innocent comparison against our own.

I have no desire to walk anyone down my memory lane. I don't always particularly like walking back through it myself; I choose to leave the past behind me.

I don't have what I feel is a fluid continuity to my past that makes its revisit particularly interesting. It was someone else who existed then - its not the same as what you see before you now (or maybe that's what I want desperately to believe). My connection to the past is quite severed. I have no childhood friends from then. The past isn't alive to me like it might be for others. What does it matter that I walked this street to school or that I skinned my knee here when I fell off my bike? I doubt those facts could possibly be interesting to anyone...

My past feels unshared and I wonder if its because so much of it has been spent alone. No siblings. Single working mom. I wouldn't say I was overall a lonely child but I was alone a lot. I didn't make many ripples or cause waves, I didn't play hooky or get sent to the principals office. I declined invites to partake of substances controlled and otherwise. I was boring, behaved. There was a part of me in some weird way that always admired and puzzled over those whose actions were so...dissenting in their nature. What was their motive? What were they saying by what they did and didn't do?

The door to my past is closed. I don't dwell on it anymore. I did. I spent a lot of time looking back which kept from me moving forward. I think there are times in our lives where we unaware live in the past. I think we do this becaue we're afraid to leave what we know so well or because we keep hoping somehow the past will make sense if we look at it long enough. Maybe at the end of all my musing, I fear the past - the pain that it caused still lives in the memories of the mind. Maybe I shut the past out to keep from sharing the pain - viewing it as infectious in someway - a bio hazard to keep from others...

What would I want for every child: that they have a continuity to their past, that they feel a sense of having a shared past, one of love and safety. Whether its in a town of a 100 or city of a 100,000 - I want them to feel that they always had a home, one of solid walls and, just as importantly, of reassuring constant hugs. May they never doubt their place of proper priority in their parents life and feel a clear fluidity flowing throughout all of theirs. xo