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
“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
“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....
