This was posted on Facebook this morning by a friend of mine, and while I certainly understand it and there's a bit of cleverness to it, I fundamentally disagree with it:
"Don't look back. You're not going that way."
Well no, you're not. Human beings can only go forward, but I propose that people who don't look back are missing a lot of things, and they often stumble blindly into the future, unprepared and vulnerable.
Shelby Foote said [I'm paraphrasing] "The southern man doesn't live in the past. The past lives in him."
From our antiques, to our treasured old bibles, to the language that persists from grandparents to grandchildren ["swap" / "my people" / "y'all" etc.] - we are tethered to the past, and it lives within us, just as Shelby said. We re-visit battlefields, and talk about old linens, and name our children for great-grandmothers long dead. We are living sentinels of the past.
my great-great grandmother, Charlotte Wood
I spent most of my 20's trying to figure out "what just happened?!" - in terms of my childhood and teenaged years. There was a lot of turbulence in my family, a lot of it related to my Type-A personality dad. I also wondered what to do with my life. I couldn't really move forward until I really grappled with it all. It was when I started smoking. I got into a lot of arguments with my dad. I planned out my marriage and children and home and all those plans kept getting revised because none of it happened the way I thought it would. Those were the years when I questioned the existence of God, and tried to figure out how to be a writer, and wondered why nobody would fall in love with me.
By the time I hit my 30's, I was slowly starting to figure things out, or at least make peace with not knowing.
Then I was 34 years old, and a week after my birthday, my dad died. Suddenly my entire life was jolted into a different groove, and I didn't like it. I had to re-calibrate, the way one always does when an important figure is jerked out of your life.
me, Dad, and my uncle Lewis
Once I became a parent, I stopped so much looking back. I quit trying to force people to come to big family reunions. I quit trying to write a novel or a screenplay. I became so engrossed in trying to help my daughter, and then manage a household that included my mom and a medically fragile dog, and work full time, that life just sort of crowded out everything else.
I think that happens for a lot of us. The day-to-day stops us from being reflective because we are simply too busy.
Now I am close to being an empty-nester. Michael has 2 more years of high school, but I know they are going to whiz by.
We talked some about his trip last night, and he said he loved skiing. This is good and bad. He may one day want to live in a place where you can ski in the winter, which is certainly not true of Atlanta.
So now I am having to re-imagine my life once again. I have some time to make the transition. It won't happen instantly.
But back to the original premise of this blog: looking back. Here is what I've learned about it, after half a century on earth.
It's OK to look back and try to understand things. In fact, it's vital. Sometimes life events happen so quickly, you're like a grain of sand on the beach, picked up, pummeled, and thrown onto the shore by forces that are huge and uncontrollable. One minute you're suspended in the warm sea, drifting along, and the next thing you know you're naked and baking under the hot sun.
OK, maybe I got a little carried away by the beach metaphor, but I think you see where I'm going with this.
I don't recall what we were discussing the other day, but my mother said "We are strong. We keep going." In other words, life knocks us down, but we get back up. I think it's behavioral, sure, but it's also genetic. Generations before me have faced hardships, and nobody has given up and/or run away. We women are strong and we pass that strength to our children.
This past year has been really bizarre, for me. I was meeting with a recruiter yesterday and trying to explain what happened in 2013, and it was almost impossible. The first part of the year I was a lame duck in a job that didn't fit. Then I was home for months and feeling horrible, and grappling with health issues. The summer was all about preparing for and recuperating from surgery. The fall was trying to re-energize my blog, and looking for more work, and then all the issues with my daughter coming home and leaving again.
So in 2013 I was the grain of sand, thrown around willy-nilly, and hating it. But I keep remembering two things.
1) However random everything felt last year, there was a plan, and God saw me through all of it. Faith is what keeps me getting up every morning.
2) I am not giving up.
I don't know what 2014 holds for me. I am still trying to work it out. I do know that for me, re-examining the forces that tossed me around last year is like picking up clothes off the floor, and folding them neatly and putting them away. If I don't pick them up, I may stumble over them and fall again.
Even if I fall again though, I will rise again.
photo by Michael Thompson
the sky
lights itself on fire
as the day slips away
reminding us
night
is merely
a breathing exercise
a precursor
and morning
re-lights the way
forward -
always
forward
