Born Again

“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
 — Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men

Does anyone talk about how much they owe the old year? Stories and blog posts about people who are going to approach the new year, start over, and do something different are common as dirt around this time. All of them seem to relegate the old year, or the past, to a closed chapter, a place they'll not visit again, an event that happened to them from which they're now divorced or have escaped.

They have, in their reckoning, become a clean sheet of paper to begin their story new.

How does that work?

In fact, the "you" who now exists in the infinitesimal line between past and future is the accumulation of every event that has occurred in your personal timeline since time itself began. The propagation of energies and forces and fields and particles and probabilities over the 17.5 billion years of this universe have resulted in this specific arrangement of the purest essence of you in this moment of time.

THIS arrangement and not some other.

If you fail to acknowledge your past, acknowledge that you ARE your past in the most perfect and true sense and not some separate thing, you are beginning your wish to change with deception and are setting yourself up to fail.

If you intend to change, that's fine. Even commendable. But trying to forget who you are in the service of that change is self-defeating. Whatever change you wish to make should be founded in knowing that you've been and done that thing you want to change, and its outcome was not what you wanted, and you've decided to try something new. And whenever you think of falling into past patterns, thinking, or actions, you can look at that place, that past that's an integral part of you, and know as a pure fact that it doesn't work for you. It isn't advice, not a theory. That fact IS you, as certain as flesh, blood, and breath.

The past that lead you to this place, that is you in any sense you care to name, is not subject to change. You can't erase it, or modify that "version" of you. You ARE your past. The future IS malleable. When you change, you're not changing the "you" defined by your past. You are using the inflexible, immutable steel of that past as a blade to shape the you of the future.

This, for me, is the essence of a "new start".

Happy New Year. May you shape your future as you will.

In Our Next Episode: A new year.  So, new stuff. A lot more fiction, I think.