Kaleidoscope: Shards of Yesterday

My Christmas reading this year is Will Ferguson's book, "Beyond Belfast" which is a telling of his 800 km hike along the Ulster Way in Northern Ireland. Ferguson is an exemplary storyteller, bringing the reader along on his journey by way of insight and humor. 

Irish history, like Middle-east history, like African history, like... human history is a story of conflict and resilience; suffering and hope; striving, subjugation and... more subjugation. As I pour myself into Ferguson's telling I find myself asking a question that has arisen many times in my contemplations: "Why do we allow our yesterdays to determine our todays?"

I'm not suggesting that we forget the past (not sure this is even possible without surgery and drugs on a mass scale). Nor do I propose that the past does not impact the present. Clearly our todays are shaped by the years in the rearview mirror. I am merely asking us all (us homosapiens) to consider honoring the story of yesteryear's sorrows, wounds, successes, and dreams as exactly what they are - a retrospect! Finished! Wisdom-foder. 

The short term for this is forgiveness - not forgetting and not holding on; letting lived moments, ancestral moments, all of our moments slip down the flow of time to make room for the possibility of new life, of a new today. Perhaps much of the world's current conflict and sorrow arises because we have chained ourselves to archival memories that bear no space for reinvention. 

What does this negative space look like? It looks like the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites; north and south; Irish Unionists and Nationalists; east and west... pick a team, pick a cause, pick a memory to kill for and watch today die in the ashes of yesterday's fires. 

From marriages to countries - yesterday forms us and yet it is our power of choice that will define us. Perhaps this New Year is an opportunity for a new storytelling, one that honors ancestral lineage by birthing today into a nova lux.

Honoring and letting go.

Something to ponder...

Living amongst the shards,
B