In order to move ahead…

I woke up this morning with thoughts racing through through my mind around every important relationship I’ve had. All at once. What could have been better, what didn’t go well, what would be the right thing to have happened, who did what, etc., etc. Then all that business just sort of evaporated. I am someone who has spend a lot of time and energy into studying human behavior; thinking about such things has been an ongoing process within me beginning in early adolescence. The thing about that process is that it’s full of traps of judgementalism. In a culture filled with such thinking, it’s easy to fall into them and start blaming, or feeling “cheated”. It’s easy to be trapped in our thoughts about the past, to get hung up in the “what if’s”. And while exploring the “what if’s” of our past actions/events may offer some exercise in constructive thinking, getting too caught up in it can also keep us from fully realizing the “what if’s” of our present.

We have to realize our parents, our friends, our lovers, our spouses, our siblings, our children, our neighbors, everybody including ourselves, we’re all on a learning curve. We’re all trying to utilize the tools, mental, emotional and physical, which we have at any given moment as well as possible. And sometimes we make a mess of it. And then sometimes it seems we’re simply handed a mess. In the latter case we may, as a knee-jerk response, just want to angrily fling blame…rather than look for what there is to work with. The best we can do is learn from the past, forgive the shortcomings, forgive the “mis-takes”: both on the part of others and those we brought into being, and move forward. Rededicated (or dedicated for the first time) to living wisely, caring for ourselves, others, our communities, our planet.

We are complex beings and, as a species, we’re finally accruing enough knowledge about our make-up, our needs, our faults, and our potentials to truly work together to engineer a world we can all not just live in, but flourish in. Let’s get away from the adolescent “it’s all about me” mentality humanity has been languishing in for a few decades. Let’s realize our interconnectedness, celebrate both our kinship and diversity, and act out of love to turn this place into the amazing home for humanity and other living things which it has the very real potential to be.