If the Present is a Gift, so is the Past

Writing Prompt: “Do you spend more time thinking about the past or the future? Why?”

Truth be told, I tend to shy away from the future. I’m uncomfortable with unknowns, and the future is nothing-but. Oh sure, I always seem to have A Plan—but I’ve also come to realize how seldom my “Plan” is what actually comes to pass. (As my Sponsor says, “If you want to hear God laugh… Make plans!”) Fortunately for me, God is a better planner than Kana, so the insufficiency of my own planning is ultimately immaterial. It goes against my Planner-nature, but I practice it: Putting the future in God’s hands and dusting off my own. Stepping back and not keeping a death-grip on my own Plans.

Right now I’m in the unusual position of not having a Plan of my own for the long-term future. Until recently, the Plan was to finish paying off our sailboat and set sail into the sunset. But we’ve just decided to sell this boat, and we’ve withdrawn the “three-to-five-years’ notice” we’d given our boss a couple years ago—so now there’s not an “end-date” to the job and home we’re living in, and there’s not a Plan in place. I’m not sure the lack-of-Plan has made it any easier to put things in God’s hands, but the future is a big old blank now, and that is not easier for my mind to handle. Relying on prayer may not be easier, but it’s surely more necessary, if that makes sense.

The past, by contrast, is fixed and known and comfortable. My mind frolics there all the time. The past is my most important asset: all the memories and experiences and learning and thinking that has made me Me. It’s why dementia is the scariest ailment I can think of.

As I wrote during our Hawai’i trip, a great value of Travel is the fact that all your experiences get added to your permanent memory bank. It’s like adding DVDs to a shelf in my brain. And because my brain is fallible and funky, I like to write about life, to sort of “fix” those thoughts and memories in place. Writing about something helps solidify my memory—and of course it creates a record to which I can return and revive that memory if it gets fuzzy. It’s why I’ve journaled since I was six years old, and it’s why I blog. It’s why I’m a camera nut, and it’s why my digital “Frameo” shuffles through hundreds of photos every day, sitting right beneath our TV where we can watch it from the couch. Not a day goes by that we don’t comment on a memory sparked by those pictures.

We tend to forget the word’s origin, but the term blog is actually a shortened rendering of web log. A captain’s log on a ship records where she has been, as well as noteworthy occurrences along the way.

I like to log where I’ve been, and record what seems noteworthy, so my mind can continue to play in the past.