Dennis On: "So...What Have I learned From All This Drama?"

So...What Have I learned From All This Drama?

While I know this site is not given to rehabilitation from past religious and theological stress, behaviors, beliefs or experiences, it is a major waste of life energy to merely rage against the machine.  

There are several ways humans react to disappointment, feeling betrayed and disillusionment.  We can rage on and on only changing from topic to topic but never growing past the repetative nature of our rage.  We can rage for a time and feel that asking, eventually, "and how does this serve me?"  is probably a question in our lives worth answering.  We can be in denial and cover up those things too painful for us to bring forward into the light of day.  We can feel blame the great Satan who we know has us in his crosshairs and only finding the right , true and final real Church of God will save us.  We can live and burn.  

I can't speak for what others have learned from this all.  I just know in my soul and without the need for any other human being on this planet to agree with me, I was sincere in the search , compassionate in the administration and believing in the message for as long as I could be and then wasn't.  I have made mistakes both small and large.  I have stomped my feel in ways that helped and ways that didn't. I have said things I wish I had never uttered and uttered things I wish I had not said.  I sat down when I should have stood up and I stood up on the inside when I was appearing to sit down on the outside.  I have lost things that I cannot get back.  I accept responsibility for all of it.  My choices were my own even if in a fog of hurt, pain and disappointment along with a healthy dose of fear and passive aggressive anger that I was taught growing up was not appropriate to express.  When you don't express it properly we end up treating ourselves for depression and anxiety.  Don't worry, neither you nor I invented this reaction to life stress. 

But why reinvent the wheel?  Why said poorly perhaps what has already been said brilliantly on this topic of learning and living with our pasts.  We all have and I suppose you only get  a past loaded with experience if you are lucky.  I know we only get older if we are lucky having buried way to many children along the way. 

When it's all said and done, the following observations by others who also had life experiences are worth noting.  Everyone has a story.  With one decision different here or there along the way, all our stories that did happen would have been merely stories that could have happened but didn't. We would have had a different story. Their stories may have been different too, but the choice to learn from it is universally the same.  

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.”
― George Harrison

 

“People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Sooner or later we've all got to let go of our past.”
― Dan Brown

“Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.”
― Sarah Dessen

“When you understand," Brandy says, "that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”
― Oscar Wilde

“My past is everything I failed to be.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“How many people long for that "past, simpler, and better world," I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?”
― R.A. Salvatore

“You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.”
― Geraldine Brooks

“You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.”
― Ann Brashares

“My past has not defined me, destroyed me, deterred me, or defeated me; it has only strengthened me.”
― Steve Maraboli

 

“The past can teach us, nurture us, but it cannot sustain us. The essence of life is change, and we must move ever forward or the soul will wither and die.”
― Susanna Kearsley,

“I’ll tell you another secret, this one for your own good. 

You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, 

should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, 

stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. 

You may think there’s something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of.
But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.
Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do—the only thing—is run.”
― Lauren Oliver

“These things...they are who you are. They brought you here. To this day. You didn't give me a chance to understand that ever the unattractive parts of you, the messy parts, were something I could accept.”
― Laura Dave

Life is what it is and does what it does.  While we have the appearance of control at times, we control nothing.  We make our choices and only learn as time unfolds the nature, wisdom and outcome of those choices.  We can long for the past all we want but only have the present moment in reality.  The past is merely a present moment gone by and the future one that has yet to arrive at which time it will simply be another present moment. 

Earth School is a hoot.  Sometimes in life there is nothing left to do but have a good laugh....

Dennis C. Diehl
DenniscDiehl@aol.com