Past is Past...

Past is past. Forget the past…. Is that really true?

If somebody takes it in its literal meaning, it is not a good idea. I had long unhappy days in my life. It continued till I find a Guru in my life (this doesn’t mean that after reading this, one should run around and find a Guru…. Come on!) He did not call me and tell ‘ jay, your problem is…..’ . Nope, nothing like that. But I realized that my sorrows or unhappiness had a lot to do with my attitude. I used to live in the past… I used to get emotional about it. My Guru’s greatest teaching is about the importance of the present moment. This is not a note on my Guru or his teachings, so….. past….. I was talking about past.

Completely ignoring our past is not wise. The positives in the past, the happiness in the past always has the ability to lift up your sprits, even in the present. Sometimes, when I feel low, what I try to do is to think about some good/pleasant/happy moment that happened in my life. It can be a moment with a friend of mine, the memory of me reading a mail, it can be a small and silly chat with someone, a smile, it can be any such ‘silly’ moments, …… it can be anything… you can feel a difference as soon as you go to that kind of memory (memory is nothing but a collection of records about the past). So, your pleasant past can still help you out. It is not just past.

What about the bad/uncomfortable part of the past? Why should we write off these negative past while it has some positives to offer? Ignoring it completely is not wise. One can always learn something from that. Some lessons… all sorts of relationships we entered into (including friendships), stayed in, or got ended up taught us lessons. When going back to those not-so-good memories, one should be bit careful. One need to just observe at those memories and don’t get involved into it once again. As we move on and on, we gain experience of many kinds…..We grew mentally. When you look at the past with that new mindset, with acceptance, it can even heal your past wounds.

Most of the time, we have this habit of blaming. Either we blame others or we blame ourselves…. “it is your mistake…’ ....”so it is my mistake….” ….When some of us see the past, we see mistakes. So, was that only mistakes? Didn’t those experiences teach us anything? Yes, they did teach us, may be we forgot to look at it with acceptance. To have a mind to accept our ‘mistakes’ will help us a lot. May be one mistake we usually make is misunderstanding them as mistakes…

Today (tonight) , let us go to sleep without any blames… don’t forget the past, but forgive it…