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Last week two former studio clients posted journal entries from decades-old recording sessions, one of them from 30 years ago with me at the production helm.
I'm impressed that there are people who keep an account of their life like this.
I tried journaling in my mid-20s, but after a year or two of filling notebooks with my angsty, romantic, self-referential, overly edited thoughts, I found it too sanctimonious.
I threw out my entries, believing there was nothing in the words I would want to remember. I wanted to eradicate all the embarrassing evidence of my paltry perceptions.
What I didn't see then, and what I'm increasingly discovering as I age, is that every age and stage I've been, still streams live inside of me.
As William Faulkner noted in his famous line, "The past is never dead, it's not even past."
We incubate in the waters of who we've been, even the puddles we've tried to mop up and toss out.
Whether in unrecorded sessions from long ago or in journaled entries like those of my documenting friends, our past is never dead.
Though our past is untouchable, almost an illusion – we still ply those waters in the present.
It can cost me if I live in regret.
Or I can redeem it, in Shakespeare's words, as prologue.
Meaning my past provides context for who I am right now, and paves the way not only for today but my tomorrow.
We're closer to wholeness embracing ourselves as greater than the sum of our past.
This is a vulnerable yet necessary process.
Dipping our bucket into the deeper waters of memory we re-member, to step more wholly into tomorrow.
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