Don't let your past decide your future

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.

Plan For Tomorrow

Current Mood: Pensive
Music Playing: Radiohead, In Rainbows

It has been a year that I would much rather just forget… 2007 started with high hopes; I really began to appreciate the people that I was surrounded with, I looked to the future with a positive outlook and an ideal girlfriend to share it with. The end of 2006 and moving into 2007 saw some difficulties, a very ill sister and myself, in a struggle to find my scholastic identity. Things didn’t get any better for my sister in 2007, and it wasn’t before long that my dad turned up in the hospital, and it wasn’t long after that, that I found myself in the hospital. During this time, I finally started to feel good about school, but there were many other things that began to compound causing so much internal strife that I slowly found myself withdrawing into my head and no one was allowed in. I don’t know how I ever let myself become so despondent, but it festered and I became a person that I didn’t know existed, a person that I hope never returns. After such an optimistic outlook for 2007, between the health of others and myself and the thinning relationships with family, friends and girlfriend, I worked myself into a crestfallen coma that I nearly never woke up from. As hard as it was to endure, the break up of a relationship that I thought would last forever was the tipping point to set things in motion to breathe life back into my vacant soul and heart. I spent the better part of two months extremely inconsolable because in the blink of an eye, I lost everything, a best friend and lover, a home, a second family, friends, everything… My life was completely altered. While watching one of my favorite Scrubs episodes, I found a morsel of encouragement. In the Scrubs musical episode, a patient hears everything in song, and just before she goes in for surgery, everyone sings the song, “What’s going to happen;” the lines that are repeated over and over again are, “everything’s ok…nothings going to happen…plan for tomorrow…because you’re going to be ok.” I found myself so moved by this song that the waterworks started flowing, but as embarrassed as I am to admit that the last show/movie that I watched that made me cry was Scrubs, it's actually kind of humorous. It was this song that motivated me to lift my spirits because everything was going to be ok. During those two months I realized the importance of friends, and how powerful an impact they make on your life; I reconnected with old friends, even went to visit one in Portland, made new friends, and reinforced the friendships that I already had. I started seeing a therapist to help me get through this rough patch and help me realize things about others, and myself, and how to keep from reverting back to such a dark place. I found solace in writing, something I had forgot about doing. I loved to write, but had I got away from it for so long, and it was invigorating to dive back into a notebook with pen in hand. Writing helped me more then I could ever fathom; I blogged and I journaled and wrote more poetry in the last four months then I probably had in the past three years. In the end, 2007 went out in a rather un-exciting fashion, and it was rather fitting that it be so. New Years Eve encompassed what 2007 was all about, a few highlights, but mostly pretty shitty! I had an incredible dinner, had a few drinks at a bar with friends and ended up at a party where upon walking in the door I nearly got in a fight with a tight pants drunk hipster; Neil got attacked and nicknamed “hot dog” by some drunk thirty something Annie look-alike, but overall it was a rather uneventful and drab evening. But the way 2007 has ended has kept me hopeful for 2008, because it can only get better and everything is going to be ok. I’m emotionally stronger and healthier then I’ve been in some time I’m looking forward to the coming semester and meeting more new faces and living a whole new kind of life. There are already plans in the works for a two-week European vacation with Neil and possibly others, I’m continuing to write on a regular basis, and don’t be surprised if you find Neil playing an acoustic set with me singing the songs that we wrote in a coffee shop somewhere in 2008. I got an email this morning from a family member of some things that George Carlin said about the state of humanity that I found rather fitting to starting a new year. So I will close this blog with a few quotes from that… “We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness…. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often... We've added years to life not life to years…We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less…Remember, to say, "I love you" to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you. Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person will not be there again. Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind…AND ALWAYS REMEMBER: Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” So to everyone; remember to breathe life in everyday, because you only get to live your life once, so make the best of every day. So goodbye to 2007, you have been rather unkind, but there’s so much more to live for in 2008.