Rewriting History

People always say: “You can’t change the past.”  I wonder, though, is that really true?

We spend a lot of time trying to change the future. On the surface, that makes a lot of sense. After all, the chain of cause and effect seems to move in only one direction. If we believe in free will, we should be able to act now in order to change what happens later. The problem is, we’re often pretty bad at predicting what the future will hold, and we’re even worse at knowing what we’ll actually want in the future once we get there. 

Maybe it’s time we focused a little of that energy on changing the past. After all, we already know what the past holds, so there’s a lot less room for false assumptions and terrible guesswork. And whereas the future doesn’t actually exist at all, and is therefore only an illusion, the past does exist--kind of. A version of it exists in our memory, and that’s a place where we have a lot of control.

The part of the past that affects us most profoundly is not the events themselves, but the way we hold them and feel about them. As we carry the past with us, we turn it over in our minds, and it evolves. Sometimes it grows blurry and indistinct. Sometimes it loses its rough edges and becomes easier to hold. Other times it grows and becomes heavier, or sharper and more painful with time.

These last memories, that hurt us everytime we pick them up and hold them, are the ones we stuff in our basements and try to forget. But even as we bury them deep in our subconscious, they continue to call us pain, sometimes in ways we scarcely recognize.

The past isn’t written in stone: it’s inscribed in our squishy, evolving, ever-changing minds. You can change your past. But first you have to pick it up. You have to get your hands dirty.