Everything is valuable.
We too often discard the past. We scoff at it, calling the us from then a blind creature with no direction and no realistic vision of the future. We laugh and call such creatures fools. How could we have not known what the now would become; how could we have ever been so ridiculous? And we toss out the old ideas, the old lines, the old pages full of the things we thought back then. We say, these are rubbish, and we leave them to the fire that devours our recollections of our old mistakes. And then, we pass on by their ash, pushing forward with eyes that do not see the road and hands that cannot grasp the map. Yet we force on in our blind ignorance of our true history, making up brilliant things of ourselves as we go. For we are pastless and grandiose.
Either that, or we cling desperately, pale handed. We light candles for the past and hold them so far up into the sky, facing away from reality, peering so carefully into the grey horizon of before that the light cannot spread anywhere but back behind us. We bow to ourselves in the past as mages, dream of others as if they were perfect, like angels. As if the past has wiped away every pain, every mistake, every lesson. Until the future is so vague, so full of not-being that it hardly exists at all.
But we must align these two views. We must balance these two extremes. Because everything is of value, every thought of the past, every memory we experience, every dream that comes from either there or there. We must comprehend these complications, and we must meld them together with a swift and deft hand.
For these conceptions of the past are deadly. They lead us into dark alleys that have no escape. They are steel traps in our intellect to confine us to dreams and nightmares, to immobilize us in this now. Either to keep us somewhere else, or make blundering disasters of our footfalls.
So let us shed all preconceptions of the past and of memory. Let us re-examine the facts of the matter. Let us re-evaluate the value of our memories, of words that come to us from the grey hallways full of ghosts of a passed reality. Let us pass through each cold ghost, let us touch each grey wall, let us travel eah old, trodden path until we can gain some beneficial direction.
Until we can hold our candles in front of us and scoff only at our foolishness to never do so. Until we can see clearly into the dawn spreading out before us. Until we can grasp the significance of what was before, and then shed its weight like a cloak that covered us in the night. Launuch ourselves from this immobility and scrutiny, and accomplish the greatness we have always had planned before us.
Either that, or we cling desperately, pale handed. We light candles for the past and hold them so far up into the sky, facing away from reality, peering so carefully into the grey horizon of before that the light cannot spread anywhere but back behind us. We bow to ourselves in the past as mages, dream of others as if they were perfect, like angels. As if the past has wiped away every pain, every mistake, every lesson. Until the future is so vague, so full of not-being that it hardly exists at all.
But we must align these two views. We must balance these two extremes. Because everything is of value, every thought of the past, every memory we experience, every dream that comes from either there or there. We must comprehend these complications, and we must meld them together with a swift and deft hand.
For these conceptions of the past are deadly. They lead us into dark alleys that have no escape. They are steel traps in our intellect to confine us to dreams and nightmares, to immobilize us in this now. Either to keep us somewhere else, or make blundering disasters of our footfalls.
So let us shed all preconceptions of the past and of memory. Let us re-examine the facts of the matter. Let us re-evaluate the value of our memories, of words that come to us from the grey hallways full of ghosts of a passed reality. Let us pass through each cold ghost, let us touch each grey wall, let us travel eah old, trodden path until we can gain some beneficial direction.
Until we can hold our candles in front of us and scoff only at our foolishness to never do so. Until we can see clearly into the dawn spreading out before us. Until we can grasp the significance of what was before, and then shed its weight like a cloak that covered us in the night. Launuch ourselves from this immobility and scrutiny, and accomplish the greatness we have always had planned before us.
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