Sans Fig Leaf

Previous
Index
Next

Email

w

"Everything before us"

2 January, 2003

Many people take New Year's Day as an opportunity to assess their life thus far and to make plans for the future. Most of those assessment begin with a simple declarative sentence: "It was a good year," or "It was a rotten year," or "The year had its ups and downs," and so forth. If you read a lot of online journals and lists and other places where a diverse crowd of people are making these declarations, you begin to feel as if you have suddenly landed in the middle of a stage production of Dicken's classic A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, et cetera."

I noticed, however, a lot of people this year dodging that part altogether. "I'm not going to assess the year, because the past is dead. What's important is the future." One or two of them then delivered a rather eloquent rant about how dwelling on the past is just wallowing in self-pity when what one ought to do is learn the lesson from bad experiences and move on.

In some ways they are correct. But in many ways, they're wrong.

The problem is they are assuming, first, that each experience has only one lesson to teach us. They are further assuming that we will be wise enough to correctly identify that lesson the first time we think about it. The first assumption is never true. Even if the first assumption were true, the second assumption seldom would be.

Let me give an example. I had a friend who desparately wanted to be in a relationship. He moaned about how he hated being alone. When he wasn't dating someone, he would grouse about how many of us friends had been in relationships longer than any of his had ever lasted.

One of his first relationships had been with a tall, handsome, charming young man from Georgia. It had ended badly, with a lot of arguing and recriminations. From then on, whenever he met a guy with a southern accent he'd say, "Oh, no. I'm not going to get involved with another of those southern charmers! I learned my lesson."

A subsequent relationship had been with a black guy, whereas my friend was white. It ended badly. From then on, if he met a cute guy who seemed to be interested in him, but happened to be african-american he'd say, "I'm not racist, but cross-cultural relationships don't work. I learned my lesson!"

Another relationship the went horribly bad had been with a shy young man whose father was a career army officer. "I'll never date another army brat. I learned my lesson!"

And he had many, many other short descriptions of the kinds of guys he wouldn't date. When I first met him I thought it was a mildly amusing quirk. Over the next three as I watched him fall in and out of a few more relationships, my opinion changed. So when he made one of his, "I learned my lesson" pronouncements one night, I asked him if maybe he'd been learning the wrong lessons? Maybe, now that he had had such a long, unending series of failed relationship, he ought to stop and reassess them all to see if a pattern might emerge?

"Can't dwell on the past," he snapped. "It's what I do now and tomorrow and the day after that matters!"

A mutual friend who had known him longer (and was old enough to be our mother), took me aside and explained that she and several others had tried many times to get him to look at the break-ups objectively. He wouldn't do it. To us, a definite pattern was evident: he only dated guys who were only recently out to themselves, who were not out to the parents, and usually had never had a boyfriend before. And the breakup always happened when the other guy got more comfortable with himself, and wanted to stop living in the closet. He was scared to death of what would happen if his parents ever found out he was gay. Even though he had been out to himself for a very long time, and although more than one of us who had met his parents were certain that they knew, but didn't know how to tell him they knew or how to ask if there was someone special in his life,

He thought the ex-boyfriends who had accused him of being ashamed of them were delusional. It couldn't be his fault that almost every single person he dated eventually made that charge, could it?

I recently ran into him on-line, having not seen him since about 1994. He's still the same. We'd barely been chatting five minutes when he said, "I'll never date a another guy that I need to teach how to tell the difference between a merlot and a claret. I learned that lesson the hard way!"

Wallowing in self-pity or anger or bitterness about things that happened in the past is self-destructive. But trying to pretend that the past doesn't matter at all is just as destructive.

We have to acknowledge the bad experiences and take responsibility for our mistakes. There is always at least some small part of the problem that we are responsible for or some point at which we could have reacted better. We have to acknowledge the good experiences, too. And give proper credit to those who contributed to the good experiences.

The part we have to let go of is the blame. Whether we are trying to place it all on other people, all on ourselves, or distributing it more evenly, blame is an insidious force that gnaws away at our reason and our hope. Letting go of the blame doesn't mean that you don't acknowledge who was responsible for what. It just means you don't keep reliving the bad feelings about the responsibility.

So, we do need to let go of the blame, the self-pity, and the bitterness; but the experiences themselves will teach new lessons again, when we reassess them from the distance of years and in light of the experiences that intervene. The more lessons about ourselves that we learn from these experiences, the better equipped we are to seize new opportunities in the future.

Never forget that the one thing which both your past and your future have in common is you.