Preoccupation with the past

               Tonight my wife was feeling irritated about how someone else had responded to a situation she was involved in.  I pointed out that nothing outside of ourselves can really disturb our inner harmony.  In fact, if you look at that statement it will be obvious that it is true.  If it is outside of ourselves, outside of our emotional body, then it cannot have an emotional impact.  It is when something invades our emotional body triggering something that is already there that the emotional body gets out of alignment.  I asked her what it was inside of her that was the cause of her lack of harmony and after some reflection she began to point out how the behavior of this other person reflected her behavior during the same day.  She followed with some examples.

               I didn’t think that she was getting to the core of the issue since what she was giving me as the catalyst for her irritation was only isolated events in her life that seemed separated from the situation we were discussing and further they could be explained away by someone just having a particularly ditzy day.  I suggested that the cause of her irritation may be deeper.  Upon reflection she saw that what was really irritating her was that this other person’s response to events in her life illustrated to my wife that her own children hadn’t learned the lessons as they grew up that she felt that she had learned on her own but not passed on.  The fact that she’d had to learn those lessons on her own but her children hadn’t learned them from her was a source of irritation.  The question still remained: “Why did that irritate her?”.

               Finally, she realized that she felt that she had failed all those years ago as a parent to teach those lessons and was unhappy to see that her children had fallen into traps that she might have prevented.  She was feeling responsible.  It was at this point that I said what I felt was really the issue.  I felt that she was dwelling on the drama, the events of her past life.

               What is it with us humans that we place so much emphasis on the quality of our children?  I suspect that what we want is to vindicate the imperfection of our own past failures, those events that we can no longer change in our own lives, by having our children do so much better.  We may feel that somehow their success means that we finally got it right ourselves.  What we forget is that our children come into this life with their own set of issues, their own karma, their own momentums to overcome.  They may, in fact, have chosen us to be their parents in order to deal with the very environment that is presented to them by that choice.  That isn’t to say we aren’t responsible for what we offer.  They aren’t subject to fatalism in their responses and we are still responsible for our own actions.  But if our children were going to be perfect they would most likely already have made their ascensions.

               Never-the-less, our preoccupation with our past, once we have examined it enough to learn the lessons that we need to learn, is generally ego supported.  That doesn’t mean that the experience will always be enjoyable for the ego.  In this case personal enjoyment wasn’t the incentive for the ego at all.  The ego wanted something to play with, to knead like Playdough, because the act of that kneading gave her ego a sense of self-substance, no matter how uncomfortable, and that is the reward that the ego received, the gratification.  The ego gained a sense of tangible existence from the experience.

               There will be no getting past an ego that we insist on feeding and, if we dwell on the past once that process has served its’ purpose, we’re feeding that ego.

               But I also suspect that our desire to live vicariously through our children is often fueled by our sense of failure in our own lives.  That isn’t to say that a personal sense of failure will automatically lead to a desire to live through them nor would the desire to do so always mean that we had been a failure.  But that there may be a relationship is to me pretty obvious.

        So, once again, the lesson here is to let go of the past.  You learn what you can from it in order to grow but you let your emotional attachment to your past go.