What a Long, Strange Trip!

Whatever has happened to you in life. Whatever hardship. Whatever pain …. They pale in comparison to the power you have to choose what to do now.

Greg Mckeown, Effortless

Sometimes the past feels like a heavy weight that we are dragging behind us.

Something happened that hurt us emotionally and maybe even physically.

Then there are the things that didn’t happen that created their own damage.

The pain and the loss are real.

It’s little comfort to know that everyone has similar experiences. Ours feel especially debilitating, mostly because they happened to us.

Following the medical model, we try to fix the root cause of our present difficulties, but we cannot change the past.

Asking how we got here is not as useful as it would seem to be.

The important question is where we want to go.

As long as we are staring into the past, we cannot see all the options available moving ahead.

And we have options.

More options than ever before in human history.

Just being able to read these words is the result of technology unavailable for most of that history — and still not available for some people living today.

That technology also allows us to overcome many of the limitations of previous generations and our own past.