“May you be happy in the life you have chosen!” This is how we ended last week’s episode.  Reflecting on this assignment made me also think about the expression “May you live in interesting times”. The latter is credited to British statesman Joseph Chamberlain and is wrongly said to be an English translation of a Chinese proverb. No such proverb or anything close to it has been identified. Both seem to be apocryphal for their ability to convey unease about the future. Your assignment last week was to think through the defining moments in your life and look at the decisions that got you to where you are and got you living the life you are living.  When we started this journey together, we had to agree you are not living the life you want to, or you would not be working through this blog. The purpose of last week’s reflection and introspection was to begin your own coming to grips as Scrooge is with the decisions and actions that got you to where you are. Maybe much of your life is great. Maybe when you look back you don’t find anything traumatic, nothing deep and dark. Maybe you never did anything terribly wrong.  This could be a case where you need to look at what you didn’t do.  Maybe you played it safe, maybe you didn’t pursue a dream, maybe you failed to push yourself. There are lots of things that can haunt you and drive you away from the life you want. Some are things you did and some are things you didn’t do. If you didn’t find anything that made you go, huh! Go back and dig again. As the book says, “…these were shadows of things that have been.”

This Week’s Talk–

Scrooge is close to wrapping up his time with the Ghost of Christmas Past. The spirit forces Scrooge to watch the tender comings of his old fiancé’s family and husband. He gets to see what he could have experienced had he been strong enough to admit to her that he had become consumed with the acquisition of wealth and lost focus on her.  During this scene, Scrooge ponders for a brief moment what it would have been like to have his own child to share such joy with.  As noted earlier, Hell can be described as having to view the life you could have led! As this vignette closes out, his old fiancé and her husband talk about the husband having seen Scrooge as he was in town earlier. Scrooge listens as the husband tells his wife that Scrooge continued on working as his partner, Marley, lies on his death bed, all alone.  This is hard for Scrooge to stomach and he asks the spirit to take him away.  The truth can be really hard to handle. Having to watch someone else having the life that you could have had (or job or skill or car or or or…) can really be torture. I know a lot of people that would say…. That doesn’t bother me. Maybe you say everything worked out OK in the end for you so you learned to let it go.  I don’t think you need to dwell on it, nor is it healthy to. Just ignoring it and pretending that you didn’t make decisions that led toward this other positive outcome is also not healthy.  I think we need to be honest about what we own, accept it, and move on with the life lessons internalized and a part of us as we grow. Divorces, missed careers that cost us bonuses and pensions, failing to pursue sports goals because you were not willing to make the commitment… the list is lengthy. The point is, these are all burdens that hold us from moving forward. They are the skeletons in our closets. Address them… and move on.  In some cases, I wrote them on balloons and let them go so I can watch them fade into obscurity and in some cases I have written them on paper and then burned the paper. Own it, come to peace and then close it out.

This Week’s Assignment

We are at the end of the visitation with the first spirit. Scrooge had all sorts of chances to see his past, to address the wrongs that he perpetrated and to see the shallow person he was then.  As Scrooge is wrapping up the end of this visitation, the book has the spirit telling him “I told you these were shadows of the things that have been. That they are what they are, do not blame me!” Scrooge tells the spirit “I don’t wish to see it. Show me no more!”  You can bury your head in the sand but the past can’t go away. As noted during this week’s discussion, The more squarely you address the past, the better you will be prepared to move ahead unincumbered by the past. 

This visitation ends with Scrooge wrestling with the Spirit. How appropriate that we all wrestle with our past. Now that you have this entire visit to use as a larger framework, go back through the exercises we undertook up to this point and look at your answers. Are you working through them as deeply and as intensely as Scrooge had to?  Is the whole of this chapter of the book, for you, a cohesive, logical diagram now that helps you see your past in a truth that you didn’t have in the past? Do you fell lighter, less held back by previous actions and ready to move on to address the current?  Think about what Scrooge went through on this visitation and make sure that you have had your own similar growth and are done wrestling with the past. A new morning is coming and I want to make sure you are ready for it. Every new day brings a new beginning.

See you next week.