I think the question is wrong. It’s not IF we spend time in the past, but HOW we spend it. Are we grateful or regretful? Do we cherish the moments we had with loved ones, or do we still mourn even if decades have passed?
Tag: <span>past</span>
…
My mother told me a lot about the past, of the Dark Days with technology and the internet. She talked about the Third World War, which hardly anyone had survived. “Before the war, people only let their machines and technology think for them instead of using their brains themselves,” my mother used to say.
***
What time and place would I travel to if there would be a time machine? My blogging friend Peter, from Peter’s pondering, asked me that question a while back, and as so often, I didn’t have an answer right away. However, I thought I found a clever way out because he had mentioned there would be no return and a one-way ticket in a time machine didn’t seem desirable at all.
We both have been sick for weeks -three weeks to be exact. We both had a cold that just lingered a bit longer than usual. I could hear my husband cough in his sleep and he said the same about me the next morning. We both finally took time off work, that’s something we rarely do.
I look around, and I can’t help but smile; I feel proud to be one of them. I see confidence and courage, we show it in the way we walk and talk. I can’t remember seeing this when I was young, but then perhaps I didn’t have an eye for it then, didn’t know what to look for.
We all know the feeling when the rest of world around us just disappears, when we sit there in silence, in our favorite chair and we start daydreaming.
I think we all get an invisible backpack when we are born. At first we just carry it around empty, but then -just after a short while- we start to fill it up.
We fill it up with memories, experiences and feelings – all of it- the good and the bad. Over time the backpack gets heavier and weighs us downs. Then it’s time for a break, it’s time to sit down and look at our inventory.
One day I came home and I wasn’t a happy camper at all. That day somebody had made fun of me in school and I felt small, ugly and misunderstood. I was too tall and way too thin. I looked like a spider, with long limbs that I would grow into a few years later. A few kids had made fun of me that day, they had laughed about me and it hurt.
.
There was a time in my life, when I thought about the past a lot. I sat there for hours, days and weeks, trying to find the answers to all the questions that I had. I wanted answers and explanations about many things that had happened in my life, but most of all about my parents. I was convinced that many things would be different, if my past would have been different.
I wrote to my Mother years ago, a letter that I never send, a letter that she never read. There was no need to send it, it wasn’t meant for her in the first place. I didn’t know if she was still alive or not, I didn’t know where she was and didn’t want to know.