Your Past is Living

It’s my opinion that the past isn’t set in stone; it’s malleable. As an author, I have an exceptional ability to fully understand and use that premise.

Let’s say that I’m writing a memoir. It’ll chronicle my life up to the present moment. It’ll detail events of the past in as vivid a manner as I’m gifted enough to express. Likely, the story will travel through conflicts, traumas, victories, and a myriad of other moments that are deemed to be important by me. All of it will be enveloped in a story in which the nucleus represents the central theme. If I’m good at conveying that story, every scene will form an integral perspective that makes the work multi-dimensional, meaning that both the reader and the author will evaluate the story’s moments from multiple viewpoints, making it rich and layered.

Interestingly, the reader will always interpret the story differently than the author does. That’s because each reader projects their experiences into each scene, interpreting events, actions, and dialogue in a manner that’s consistent with their worldview – even when they’re exposed to new realities. Therefore, the reader’s interpretation of the happenings in my memoir, which are a part of my past, will be interpreted differently than how I interpret them. It can’t be any other way. No two people have the exact same viewpoints in all facets of what we call life.

So if what I’ve chronicled in my memoir is interpreted differently by everyone who reads it, then my past is flexible.

As time passes, everyone on the planet changes. You can’t prevent aging, and there is no life without movement, which includes thoughts and the changing nature of everything in and around us. It stands to reason, then, that with accumulated experience, over time, my interpretation of my very own past will change. In other words, if I were to chronicle the same story (my memoir) five years after having produced it originally, it’s highly likely that my views, interpretations, feelings, and memory of past events will color the telling of the story, in a new palette of colors. 

My past will have changed.

And it does change – according to the way I see the world today.

If you agree with me, the implications are stunning. Since perception is reality, it means that we literally have the ability to change our pasts. Or more specifically, our perceptions of the past.

Interestingly, even when we’re writing a piece about the future, we’re forced to use knowledge from the past to construct the writing. There’s no way around that. So the past shapes the future. This is a drag if we vehemently despise our pasts. But the more compassion we bring to our pasts, the more that evolving perception of our experiences shifts, creating the possibility of a newly seen past that helps shape our future.

You don’t have to be an author to recognize what I’ve realized. Anyone can do it. But I’ve discovered that the act of writing, whether journaling, story telling, writing poetry, or even writing an email forces the creator to examine their writing from a current perspective. And given that we’re always moving, even reviewing your email two days after you initially wrote it will allow an evolved view of the past to inform how you’ll reposition that email. Have you ever written a pointed email, filled with rage, and not sent it immediately? What happened when you looked at it the next morning? 

Change your perception, change your past.