It occurred to me today that the past is rather obdurate.

Fair warning, this one is a little long.

When you think about memory, and how your memory works, at least for me, I tend to remember things of emotional importance, at least over the long haul. I can’t remember what I had for dinner last Thursday because it is of no emotional importance. I can’t remember the names of all of the kids that I taught in my Senior English class ten years ago because that list has no emotional importance. I do, however, remember holding my father in my arms as he sobbed over the death of my only brother, his youngest son. I do remember the joy of seeing my wife coming down the aisle toward me at our wedding, and I suspect that I always will.

But those events are gone, inasmuch as I no longer have any power to make any changes to them. My wedding ceremony, my brother’s funeral, the birth of my three children; all of these events are solidified. The details surrounding them, the events leading up to them, everything in my life, up to and including the minute, two minutes ago, when I started writing this sentence, they are all immutable and gone. The past is the past, and the size of that past continues to grow, in each of our lives, as every moment that passes becomes a part of… the past.

This, of course, leaves our future constantly shrinking in size, as well, if you think about it.

Your past has a known size to it, however, that your future does not. I, at the moment that I am typing this, am forty-four years old. That just so happens to make me 16,322 days old, exactly. Now, go ahead and ask me (or ask yourself, for that matter) how many days I have in my future.

This puts all of us on a little slider that is sliding toward that place where there is no more slide left. As we grow closer to that point, the space that we’ve left behind –the space behind the slider as it slides– grows larger. Once you are out of slide, your past also happens to reach its maximum size –> a size that is equal to the length of your whole life. At the moment of your death (whenever it comes) your future equals zero and your past is as large as it will ever be.

The great thing about the future that the past doesn’t have going for it
–the great thing that almost makes up for the fact that we have no idea how much future there is for each of us– is that the future is malleable. I may be more than 16,000 days old, but not a single one of those days has any flexibility to it. Those days when I was a jerk to people that I love, those days when I wasted my time in a farce that mocked what life should truly be about, those days when I fell short of being the person that I aspire to be; not a single one of those days is available to me ever again. Lost. Gone. Irredeemable.

The future, despite the fact that I might have four more days or forty more days or fourteen thousand more days, is 100% chocked full of days that are 100% still adjustable. If I decided, at the very moment that I am typing on this keyboard, that I am going to spend every day that follows this one pursuing my secret dream of becoming a scuba instructor, then the future is mine to write.

* * *

Speaking of writing, I am working on a novel (actually, truth be told, I am working on a series of five novels) and the writing of the novel(s) has been an interesting process; I have powers, in my creation of the worlds in these novels, to do what I am powerless to do in my own life. If my character suffered as a child because he was a bit of a dweeb, and I’m not okay with that for him, I can simply go back and change that. My dweeby main character could just as easily be the star quarterback who marries the head cheerleader, if I change the right sentences here and there.

I, unfortunately, can’t do anything about the fact that I was a finalist in the North American Greatest Dweeb contest, representing the great state of Michigan, for six years from 1985 to 1990. I would have won in ’87, if it weren’t for the fact that the representative from North Dakota was a major nerd.

The other day, I was doing a timeline review for one of my novels and I discovered that one of my major characters had her first daughter at the age of twelve. Oops. So, I simply moved her birth year back eight years. Problem solved. If only that were possible in real life, right?!?! I’m unhappy about being middle-aged, then BAAM! I move my birth year from ’75 to ’65, and I am now just hitting the prime years of my thirties.

When it comes to creating my characters, there really isn’t much of a limit to what I can or can’t do. I have a different character who is very unlikable. To show how unlikable he is, I throw two ex-wives into his past, one of which moved to the other side of the continent, just to get as far away from his as possible, and then it’s obvious that this guy is really unpleasant.

My past, regrettably, is not open for editing.

* * *

I’ve recently, quite by accident, discovered the whereabouts of a childhood friend of mine. This revelation has focused my thoughts on him, as of late, in a way that I wasn’t expecting; to be honest, he’s been invading my mind. As a matter of fact, I think I wrote about him in my blog post on trust a few days back.

It may be generous to describe the relationship that we had, years ago, as a friendship. It really probably wasn’t.

I don’t know if it has ever happened to you –> a situation like this, where you have a chance at reaching out to someone from your past to try to reconnect. When it happens to me (it’s happened at least a few times), I wrestle with whether or not to make contact, whether or not to try to renew the ties.

But, in this particular situation, and in consideration of the circumstances of my life right now, I am feeling differently. This time, I find myself wondering about the past, and the person that this person was to me back then.

In my past, this guy was not a nice guy –> to me or to most anyone else; he treated most of the people around him poorly, as an immature teenager who was accustomed to using manipulation, threats of violence, and emotional blackmail, to get whatever he wanted.

That’s who he was in my past.

And I, in that same past, was willfully subservient to my peers, to get them to like me. I was desperately starving for social approval, so much so that I looked for friendship in dark alleys down which I had no business venturing.

That’s who I was in my past.

But today, I am further down the road than I was formerly. It would be unreasonable for me to expect that this guy is not also further down the road in his journey. Did he develop out of his slightly sociopathic ways, to become someone who is capable of properly interacting with other people, just as I was able to develop out of my futile exploits in the realm of social acceptance? Do I really want to try to reconnect with him, to discover whether he did or not?

* * *

They say that one of the most important parts of a good novel is character development. We love to read about individuals who are able to work their way through the sins of their past, or through the pressure of their present circumstances, to arrive at a future that is better than what they might have otherwise hoped for.

I’d like to encourage you to let go of the rigid past. Write your story in the days that are yet to come.