Judgements from The Past

I am having my coffee and randomly checking my Facebook messages. All of a sudden there are a lot of memories from past summers surging to the surface as if someone had thrown them from the sky. It takes me some time to remember some of those moments. Some others are still vivid in my mind. As I scroll I surprise myself smiling or clenching teeth as I judge them as being of value or not.

I can still perceive in some of them the energy of pride, or that of proving that I was a good student of life. A phrase I read this morning somewhere pops to my mind: when you are looking at the past you create disasters in the future. I am paraphrasing, yet this is how it stays with me.

How long are we busy every day analysing the past? From diets, to clothes, to friends, to career choices, to friends… to everything? How long are we living our present moments fuelled by the past?

You know… One day you got to your dressing, pull out a dress and it’s no longer fitting. Or you get a new assignment at work and you no longer find the ease and energy you used to have a few months back. You would like to talk to your friends from childhood and you realize they changed and you changed… and somehow still expect for your relationship to be the same?  

What if looking at the past would be like looking down, at your feet, are you even interested in looking what’s ahead of you?

I remember that before I gave birth to my first child, I took breastfeeding lessons. The nurse was teaching the moms how to hold the baby (a doll) while telling us how to recognize that there was enough suction for optimal feeding. What I have noticed is that somehow all the moms-to-be from the room had the same reflex: the head of the ‘baby’ was facing straight up in a difficult position for it to grasp the breast. The nurse would then come to us one by one asking what would be the most comfortable position for us to hold the babies. It sounded strange. None of the ‘new-moms-to-be’ seem to have the inspiration to turn the baby with the nose to face their body. As if we didn’t know what to do… ‘It’s like trying to walk and keeping your had just above the tip of your shoes. Or eating with a fork and putting food into your ears.

How many times have you been doing something just because you had the impression you didn’t know how to do or be different? That it didn’t even occur to your mind that there could be a different perspective of looking at things? How many of us have learned to look at the past, judge the hell out of it, analyse it, scrutinize the shit in it and then conclude about what we were supposed to to or not, what we should better not try again, how to keep us safe?

What if walking is much easier with the head up? What if creation is much more fun if you tapped into what would be joyful to have in your liferather than what we call mistakes or catastrophes? What if instead of preparing ourselves for what ‘didn’t work and should be avoided’ we would allowed ourselves to have the curiosity and play of… “I wonder… what else is possible here?”

What if instead of looking at the past for answers in the future we would just take a moment, ask a question and look for the awareness that would lead our way to much greater than we have ever analysed or concluded possible?

What choice can we all make today that is already creating futures?