Your past

Hi.

I. Don't. Care. About.Your. Past. That seems pretty transparent to me. But maybe it's not. I want to be perfectly clear. I don't care if you used to be a transsexual neo-nazi pod person that drank human blood, lived in a castle made of human skulls, and ate live babies for fun. I don't care if you used to be in the service and killed dozens of people because Uncle Sam told you to. Or if you just murdered people because you wanted to. I don't care if are an alcoholic, or if you used to be a prostitute or a rapist. I don't care about all the crimes and sins you used to commit or the laws you used to break.

Yes. All of those things have dark tragic stories full of angst, fear and frustration attached to them. And if you need a shoulder to cry on or just feel that you need to confess to someone about the horrible, terrible things that you used to do, I am here for you. I will listen, my heart full of love and empathy, for your sorrow and tragedy.

Your past is your past. It is all of the things that you have done and experienced right up until this very moment. It is NOT who you are though. Your past is who you used to be. All of it. It isn't just what you did ten years ago. What you did yesterday is part of who you used to be. But, you can't change those stories. They happened.

What you can change is your future.  And it is your future that I care very much about. Your past isn't important to me, simply because it didn't happen to me. I didn't experience it for myself and in fact I can't every truly experience it.

I have my own crimes and sins in my past, things that I'm not proud of. These things in my past, they shaped who I was up until a certain point, until I realized that they don't have to. There is no real reason, why there needs to be any connection at all between who you used to be and who you are becoming, other than for you to remember where you started out.

Every moment is a new opportunity to reshape your future. You can step entirely out of the mold of your past and make a new you. Stop carrying around all the guilt and angst for past mistakes. You know what you did was wrong and you've punished yourself about it for long enough.Step into a new future, one where you use the experience that you've earned from the mistakes that you have made to do things right this time.

I know from both book learning and personal experience that the harshest judge there is lives inside each one of us. We punish, tear down and destroy ourselves, more harshly than anyone else alive could ever hope to do. So, I don't need to judge you based on your past, and I won't.

I will however judge your actions in the current and decide based on the outcome of those actions, if I think you are someone that should be around me, my friends and family. Even if I decide you shouldn't be around us, that doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, just not one with the kind of energy we want around us. And even then, sincere regret for your wrongdoings and a declaration of new intent for the future would be enough for me to reconsider.

In life your past trials and tribulations don't mean anything. The true test of a person is always the current test. It's the only one that matters. And then it becomes the past. Its importance fades and a new "true" test arrives.

What I care about is your future. Who you plan to be, and who you become, from this moment on are all I care about. Most of your past is who you were at your worst. What I am interested in is who you are at your best.

Show me