|
WE NEED THE PAST . . .
We need to carry it with us into the future. Yet there are some tricky ways that the past can keep us from being present.
Reflecting on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I came across this succinct and powerful statement, in a newsletter from Toi Smith:
"To remember someone honestly is not simply to acknowledge them. It is to ask what responsibility their work places on us now."
At the same time as this resonated with me, I also felt the pain of awareness that 'responsibility' has become a word that turns people off, or turns people away. It can prompt confusion, defensiveness, even panic...and the truth is, I'm not here to qualify those responses. The impact of human mistakes and harms on the world is overwhelming.
The thing is, I do believe it's important to listen to my heart, and sometimes what my heart tells me is influenced by a lot of stuff that isn't my heart. It's pain, or false beliefs, or attachments to the past that are desperately trying to save me from future hurt.
If the idea of my responsibility overwhelms me, it may be because I'm exhausted by a feeling of pressure to change things I can't change. So often, that pressure comes from a hidden desire to change the outcome of the past, which I've mistaken for the future.
The past as a source of knowledge, like history, is something that, arguably, we must carry with us, because we will always need the lessons of the past. But it can be easy to think the past is the future, a mistake that may lead to despair or hopelessness, or just feeling downright tired.
Instead, I need to carry the past with me as I surrender to the deep uncertainty and imagination of the future - which may have some familiar landmarks, but is otherwise entirely unknown to me, by design.
When I feel the pressure to 'fix,' or to find the 'one right answer,' I am - whether consciously or not - failing in my faith that I am but one small part of a larger whole. To feel hopeless or helpless is to forget that small things do matter. But to be cut loose, to untether myself, from vigilance, urgency, and individualism, is to float in connectivity with all the billions of other tiny, inconsequential beings, whose importance is felt in the alchemy of doing my work and letting them do theirs.
The emotion of the human history we're living through can be confusing, and threaten to carry us away. But emotions are also the source of our connectedness. Without them, we wouldn't experience the power of our common humanity, and the truth of our interdependence.
Our connectedness as humans is a source of such power that it can be a trigger for feeling overwhelmed by great responsibility...and also a cue to remember our tiny place in the enormous web of actions toward change that are going on around us all the time. We need only to stay open, and curious, and do our part.
Last week, we asked about small things, and Erinn wrote to share this story:
"My neighbor tore her ACL last week. She heats her home primarily by wood stove. She can still move the logs from the back patio into the house, one by one (and she won’t let me take that from her!) but she cannot fill and move the wheel barrow from the side of the house where the wood pile is. I check in with her every few days to go restock her wheel barrow. She helps, of course. Willful, after my own spirit. And now we get to talk to each other face to face for a few minutes on the regular…See how each other is doing in the face of all that is before us."
Together With You,
Dor + Tay
|
