Theodore Roosevelt once said:“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
My sentiments exactly.
We all have a past. We all have things we have done, said, been--that we would have liked to be different. Yet, that is part of the human experience. Part of being fully human includes getting your hands dirty. We know and appreciate joy because we have experienced sorrow; we know and appreciate love because we have been familiar with fear and envy. We do not grow as humans until we live fully in the human experience, in all its wonder and agony and beauty and ugliness.
We cross paths with perhaps thousands of people in a lifetime, and who is to say how many of them are there to learn their own lessons by knowing you, or you, them? We can say that a person inflicted pain on us, or was our nemesis, wronged us, or in some way did us damage, yet perhaps this is the only way we could have learned what we needed to learn. We can indeed thank these people in our minds and hearts for bringing us valuable lessons (i.e., everyone can be a teacher) even though this is often hard to do, because if we blame someone else, we don't have to take responsibility for ourselves.
It's a real challenge to be okay when your past rears its head via the opinions from those who were alongside you during the journey; those who saw the dark side of your soul, the ones who might have felt the sting of your lessons, the pain of your anger or angst or confusion. It then becomes about forgiving yourself; and yet, why would we need to forgive something that is intrinsically part of the process and indeed the very reason we are here? While there is a precarious balance between personal accountability and accepting the inevitability of human foibles, this balance can be had, and is one we should strive for.
I have done so, and continue to do so, even amid my own frustration, confusion and misinterpretations. I am not the same person i was 10 years ago. If i was, it would indicate that i am not evolving. And i find that concept not only unacceptable but repulsive.
I am not merely a human being, but a human, BEING.
) but they are not exactly the same. Perhaps these similar/dissimilar experiences serve to keep us open to new possibilities--new directions in our thinking, our beliefs, hope, when hopelessness so effortlessly seeps into us...so that we don't become jaded, even though all around us appears to be the same old song and dance. The song is always the same song. But it's not. The dance is always the same dance. But it's not. Nothing is ever as it seems, yet everything is just what you think it is. This is the eternal conundrum of life on this plane of existence. There is meaning in it, even amid frustration. In fact, the more frustrating it is, the more meaningful it usually turns out to be. And still, there is order in the chaos, method to the madness, peace amid the battle.
As a creative person, it is necessary for me to open myself up and take chances. To create art of any kind, you must be able to dig down and reveal yourself in order for the creative result to be honest and visceral and meaningful. I have learned that when you open yourself up to SOMEONE, a specific someone, thinking they might be significant in your life--a future lifemate, a soulmate, perhaps--you always take the chance of having that personal information twisted and thrown in your face when things don't turn out they way they want. You might be having a spiritual/emotional crisis that you are trying desperately to work through, but the minute the situation disappoints them and their own goals, they reduce your feelings to mere character flaws, they spit venom at your self-worth, Then everything they embraced and loved and understood about you morphs into this ugly Grendel, and you suddenly become the embodiment of all their own angst and fear and ugliness. They turn on you, they load their weapons and they begin to fill you full of holes.