Ghosts of the past

Ghosts of the past
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2006

Letter to a Stranger

Whatever you do,
Wherever you roam,
Whoever you touch,
However brief the smile,
You’ll always leave a part of yourself behind,
Since people, places and moments
Grow a memory of their own.

Through the silent stroke of your presence,
You keep changing my existence,
By little or by much,
Forever.

I wrote the Letter to a Stranger a long time ago, for someone long forgotten; or maybe was it for no one in particular?

Why do we spend so much time running away from our past and slashing the ties that bind us to it, when these are the essence of who we are today?

A million moments and a thousand faces have lead me precisely where I stand now, but there is one big flaw in the fashionable theory of living “here and now”: there is no such thing as the present!

Dreams, ideas and hopes float around in a misty future; one day they suddenly rush towards you, overwhelming and brutal, changing shape, loosing their color. And then they are gone. So we cast the pain aside, draw a line and erase our emotional links to those past experiences. We pretend to live in the present.

And by doing so we become ghosts of ourselves. Mere reflections of who we could have been. Refusing to accept that yesterday commanded today’s act is worse than refusing to live late. It’s accepting to die early.

Posted at 4:43 AM in Schtroumpfissime:

1 Comments

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1 - Sigrid says:

« You talk about running away, slashing ties and erasing emotional links to past experiences. Your premise is flawed. Only by fully accepting and integrating our past emotional landscape can we be at peace with it. There are no such things as mistakes. At every moment of our lives, we do the Very Best that we Can do. And Know how to do. That is enough. »
Date of comment: 2006-02-08 10:43 •
2 - germaine says:

« I agree with Sigrid. We are only humans
and what we do is the very best we can do at that moment. We can always judge,
later, harshly, a behavior that seems
now irresponsible, or selfish, or meaningless, but we forget that at that
precise moment, that was the best we
could achieve. And we keep on learning,
mistake after mistake, and as we grow,
we learn compassion. For ourselves and
for all human beings because the more we grow the more we understand how hard it is to live. »
Date of comment: 2006-02-11 23:16 •

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