Current Mood: Tired
Music playing: Random, everything on my project playlist
It has been too long without a computer...And though I planned on waiting until I got my computer back full of music and saved links etc. to use at my disposal, my mind simply could not wait. There's a notebook full of ideas and thoughts that have been brewing in my head and one of them must be unleashed into the blog!
After such a grand intro...on with the blogging!
"Don't let your past decide your future."-Frederick R. Bliss
I was mindlessly flipping through a magazine while waiting for dinner to bake in the oven when I came across an article that struck me. I had recently been thinking a lot about the tumultuous last year and so when I came across this very interesting article, I knew I had to get my thoughts about it down. The title, "The Biology of Loss;" The article discussed the profound negative effect personal events can have on the brain. The article mentions a research in which 75,000 companies were traced by their performance 2 years before and after the CEO had experienced a family death. The statistics: financial performance declined 20% after the loss of a child, 15% after the lost of a spouse and 10% after the lost of other family members. The study showed that people that are grieving have increased activity in a very broad network of neurons linked with mood and memory as well as perception, conceptualization and the regulation of the heart and other vital organs. The more one dwells on the negatives, the more developed the pathways for the neurons become causing chronic preoccupation, sadness and depression.
It makes sense that the brain is inadvertently affected by how much you allow yourself to delve into matters in your head. When you think about how hard it is to move on after the loss of someone in your life whether it be because of death or other reasons, you feel the changes in your body; your heart literally aches, you don't feel hunger and everything makes you cry! So many people are driven to drugs to calm the nerves or are driven insane by their perpetual thought process, or even worse are driven to doing harm to themselves because they cannot find any other outlet for their frustration and depression.
I started thinking about my life, the lives of others I've known and wondered; if we live too much in the past tense does our present tense become indistinguishable?
I had my share of personal issues to deal with over the past year; no deaths, but death was on my mind with a few of my own family members and a multitude of other stresses of life. I remember engrossing myself in a negative state of mind, worrying, constantly, about others, about myself, about life. Even when things slowly got put behind me, I had trouble letting go. The grief I was putting myself through expanded the channels for those neurons to travel and I literally lost touch with reality; the past and present tense was one of the same, and the future tense did not exist. I've known people in similar situations, the only difference was the future didn't exist because they made it not exist, permanently... I completely agree that such extreme grief can cause the brain to act in certain ways; I definitely had an altered state of perception and I was often unhappy and depressed. Unfortunately this inadvertently affected the people around me...
If we constantly think about the past, how are we to move forward? We cant, we are unable to live in the present while dwelling on the past. We will always let opportunities and people pass us by because we're trying so hard to change the past that we create a false idea of what the present is and what the future is. Our perception of what is going on around us becomes so skewed that we eventually know no other alternative and the channels grow wider... If grieving has the capability of altering our mood, and even the productivity of our organs it makes living each day all the more difficult and if you don't seize every day then you just aren't living. Living in your past is like being trapped inside a bubble watching the rest of the world pass you by.
I remember an episode of Scrubs in which JD says, "every day is made up of tiny little tests;" as simple of a thought as this is, its incredibly relevant. We can't live in a world of what if's and why's because you can never answer the questions to the test correctly if you're constantly thinking about the what if's and the why's. "In the end it's the what if's that hurt the most." I've quoted Jeanette Winterson's book Written on the Body before, but in this case, the meaning of the what if's changes; the what if's hurt the brain, not just the heart. The what if's and the why's are past tense and when there is an overflow of them in your vocabulary and in your though process it makes it hard to distinguish what you are trying to live for each day. "My biggest fear will be the rescue of me."-Incubus. I've been able to find myself in a much better place then what I have been; yes, it took losing myself, losing friends and mending a broken heart to reach this place, to find myself, but it feels good to be back in my skin again. The past is now only relevant in that I passed one major test; I needed to feel those lows and I needed to experience those struggles so that I can stand here now, having learned and grown and not worry about looking backwards, instead look forward modifying the present tense for a better future.
The past doesn't have to affect you if you don't allow it. Optimism is the best answer to fighting living in the past tense; you have to understand that what happened, happened for a reason and you can't change that, nor can you avoid the daily stresses of life, because as one man once said so eloquently, "Shit happens." That's the thing about life, you really don't have any control over it; what you do have is control over yourself and the decisions you make and so you have to be grateful for what you did have, what you shared with the people that are no longer in your life and remember that the heart of life is good.
