"How do you leave the past behind when it keeps finding ways to get to your heart? It reaches way down deep and tears you inside out 'til you're torn apart..." RENT, the musical
I've previously stated that the past is only relevant in that it shaped who we are today, but we can take comfort in the fact that no matter what direction our past has put us on, what we do today will shape our future, and can alter our course of direction. Nonetheless... the past can still have a pretty powerful hold on the present.
Nostalgia, for example. You look back on some part of the past wistfully, remembering the good times. Sometimes this makes you blind to the fact to how much has changed since then. Then there's the other side of the coin, where you know how it all turned out "in the end" and wind up regretting what happened. But do you really know for certain if that's the end of it? Your perspective of a current situation will be drastically different a year from now, and perhaps even more different when you look back five years from now. Hindsight isn't necessarily always twenty-twenty; it just colors our vision of what happened in a different way.
Moreover, however, I'm thinking about repeating the past, and breaking patterns. How do you "get over" something traumatic that happened to you? How does one break your own automatic physiological responses to triggers? How do you break away from "toxic people" and toxic situations?
We know for a fact that people change, for better or for worse. And since everyone changes, a relationship between two people (romantic, platonic, or any relationship) can never really be the same from one day to the next, not even from one moment to the next, really. People change, and sometimes mature, and there are cases where growth means growth apart. Isn't it funny, though, that sometimes you can still be really close with someone and carry on a wonderful relationship with them, even though you both have changed drastically? But other times, the changes just make you grow even further apart?
Why do we let ourselves get into the same situations? For that matter, why do we let the same people hurt us over and over again? "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me." That's only logical, isn't it? So why do we keep giving people second, third, sixty-eighth chances? Do we really expect them to change? How much does a person really change? We slide into old habits if we haven't learned (or properly reinforced) new habits to replace them. It takes a lot of conscious effort to change oneself in some situations, like addictions (whether it's a chemical substance, a maladaptive coping mechanism, a sport, a video game, or even just addictive thought patterns). Are there, perhaps, some things about a person that simply cannot be changed without a ton of conscious effort? Are there things that can't be changed no matter what you try to do about it?
We're told that history is bound to repeat itself. I do believe that time is more cyclical than linear in nature. But once in a while you get a huge paradigm shift. Like between the Middle Ages (more appropriately known as the Dark Ages) and the Renaissance. Or the Industrial Revolution. For that matter, the Agricultural Revolution.
Is it possible, then, for a human being to undergo a personal paradigm shift? How do you know when a person (yourself or another) has truly changed?
