I made mistakes and regret smudging the canvass of my life’s masterpiece. So I vow to be more careful, knowing full well that my record and reputation precedes me. It sounds easy to “fall, get up, wipe the dust off” and move on. Perhaps if I were alone, it would be that easy. But there is that unforgiving, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks world out there with a mindset that has the tendency to nail people to their past. The same world to begin with, that imposed its values upon me. A demanding world that was poised to reject me if I did not conform or be like everybody else. A hostile world I viewed as the threat to my freedom of expression and individual uniqueness. A cynical world that believes I did it and can do it again because it considers all beings to be the sum of their history. A threatened world now challenging the change I have become.
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This blog began as a biographical draft and turned out to be a discourse on self awareness. I thought I would get to know and understand what I have become after all these years and move on with the understanding that we are what we have become. And that is precisely the trap that conformity got me into. It is a trap that denies the miracle of change, of the human being’s malleability and capacity to transgress his present circumstances and evolve into a new specie within the same lifetime.
It is not as easy as I thought it would be to come out of one’s shell. To move from one mold to another and emerge like a new born baby. It is easier said than done because there are internal and external conversations that say the same thing: that isn’t me. The old me fights to protect its turf to prove it has been right all along and will not allow the new me to takeover. It stands in the way and cheers when the new me attempts to assert itself and fails to make its mark. It is a battle of a fragile seven year old against a sturdy forty eight year old. It is the ultimate example of bullying.
A great deal of courage and determination is required to bury something that has been with me all my life. Specially something that brought pleasure and excitement. A great deal of courage and determination is required to emerge through something that has entrenched itself far too long. It is like water breaking through stone. A great deal of courage and determination is required to see that which has never been seen. It is like the magic photograph that reveals a hidden image seen only from a distance or a squint of an eye or the ghosts that have always been there but we refused to look at them or even acknowledge their presence.
The quantum world view considers everything as pure potential until an observer with all his expectations, preconceptions, programs and judgments steps into the picture and a world ultimately of his own making is revealed. With these filters, the observer will be blind to anything outside the parameters of his perception boundaries. As co-players we bring with us everything we are capable of manifesting. As co-observers, we bring to the theater our own set of expectations. And with the fusion of both, commonalities emerge and we have physical “reality” in front of us and everything outside of this framework is thrown back to “mere” potentialities or illusions.
It is difficult to shake off impressions created by past actions and even more difficult to wiggle out of an observer’s fixations particularly if he is someone from the past or carrying some knowledge of the past with a tendency to bring back to life a personality trait buried a long time ago. It would take a totally compassionate individual to allow another to metamorphose from the hairy caterpillar to an awesome butterfly. But more importantly, it would take a totally committed person to keep his unwanted past buried and stand his ground, born again regardless of temptations by the present to resurrect the dead.
Reunions are great if it celebrates the excitement of a future paved by the present. It is sad when the dead is reincarnated by endless episodes of how we were rather than how we are and could be.
