Detaching from the past

When we detach from the past it creates a vacuum inside, as we hold on to our pasts in  a guarding manner. Suddenly, we have nothing to fall back upon. Our personal history has all of a sudden obliterated. Does that cause anxiety? Or the need to fill it up again with those memories? No, it creates uneasiness, but not anxiety or the need to fill it back again. However, it does create certain nothingness inside, a gaping hole, though in a comforting way. I don’t really know how to define this.

Reminds me something that I read in Paulo Coelho's 'The Zahir'.

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“According to the tradition of the steppes – which is known as the Tengri – in order to live fully, it is necessary to be in constant movement; only then can each day be different from the last. When they passed through cities, the nomads would thing: The poor people who live here, for them everything is always the same. The people in the cities probably looked at the nomads and thought: Poor things, they have nowhere to live. The nomads had no past, only the present, and that is why they were always happy”

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“How does one go about abandoning the story one was told?”

“By repeating it out loud in meticulous detail. And as we tell our story, we say goodbye to what we were and, as you’ll see if you try, we create space for a new, unknown world. We repeat the old story over and over until it is no longer important to us.”

“Is that all?”

“There is just one other thing: as those spaces grow, it is important to fill them up quickly, even if only provisionally, so as not to be left with a feeling of emptiness.”

“How?”

“With different stories, with experiences we never dared to have or didn’t want to have. That is how we change. That is how love grows. And when love grows, we grow with it.”

“Does that mean we might lose things that are important?”

“Never, the important things always stay; what we lose are the things we thought were important but which are, in fact, useless, like the false power we use to control the energy of love.”

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Detaching from the past helps us in living our lives in a more fuller manner, we no longer keep blaming things in the past for our present or look at the past happiness longingly. Each day, we need to create a new reality, a new life, a new happiness. Live each day.