"If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts..."

I guess one of the things I have to look forward to as I move into the "Second Act" of my life is the gradual betrayal of my memory circuits. The biggest problem is that my memory has never been all that great. Sure, I can remember all sorts of useless trivia, jokes, song lyrics, baseball statistics, you name it. Unfortunately, most of the time I can't tell you what I had for dinner last night. Sometimes I leave the house and forget where I'm going. Being an adult with ADD definitely doesn't help this situation.

The lyric I chose for my title is from the Counting Crows song, Mrs. Potter's Lullaby. I think its a pretty profound statement. At mid-life, we begin to experience a plethora of changes. Our attitudes change, our interests change, some of us undergo personality change, or changes in career or relationships. Many of us go through separation or divorce at mid-life. One of the biggest relationship changes we face is the change of relationship with our parents. They have always taken care of us. Now, many of us are beginning to take care of them. Some of us have already had to say goodbye to our parents. Fortunately, I still have both of my parents in my life and nearby. Well, they're far enough away that there is some space, but close enough that I can reach their house in under 15 minutes. They are already into the portion of life where their once reliable memories have begun to fail them. My dad would call this a blessing if he could only forget to bring my mom home from the store one day.

My point about memory is this: Whenever we begin to consider changes to long-standing elements of our lives, such as career, marriage, residence, etc., we are often held back from making these changes by the memories of how things used to be. We tend to look back at our life through the rose-colored lenses of memory. We recall fondly the "good old days" or as Bruce Springsteen calls them, our Glory Days. Is there some way to honor this memory of times gone by, the good and the bad, yet still move on with our lives and not be held to static attempts to relive these supposedly halcyon days of our youth?

You can get just so much from a good thing
You can linger too long in your dreams
Say goodbye to the "Oldies But Goodies"
Cause the good old days weren't always good
And tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems
- Billy Joel, Keeping the Faith

I have some extremely fond memories of the previous fifteen or twenty years of my life. Many of those memories are either experiences from my college days, where I prepared for my career and met my spouse, memories from the fourteen years of my teaching career, or memories of good times I have had with family, friends, wife, and other loved ones. When I consider wholesale changes to large portions of my life's canvas, I sometimes feel as if I am dishonoring these memories. We often think, "Things were so great, surely they can be that way again."

“Much as we may wish to make a new beginning, some part of us resists doing so as though we were making the first step toward disaster.” – William Bridges

I have often heard the proverb, "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't." This fear of letting go of our past, not just the pleasant memories, but also of our gremlins, our devils, our inner demons, holds us back from stepping off the solid ground of our seemingly secure current life and leaping into that great abyss of change. What is this disaster we fear? If we fall freely in that abyss for some time, surely we will at least feel the exhilarating rush of wind past our face. The only thing we have to fear after such a long fall is the sudden stop at the end. However, are we not falling already? Is the ground of our current life as stable as it seems to us? I can certainly feel tremors and see cracks opening in the ground of my life. I would rather willingly step into that land of change rather than being thrust into it unwillingly. I will welcome the fall on my own terms. Still, it is difficult.

One of the things that has helped move me towards change is the power of synchronicity. Things have led me to where I am. To borrow another song title, this one from Amber Pacific, Everything We Were Has Become What We Are. I was reminded recently that when I was considering my last big life change, synchronicity pushed me over the edge and gave me the impetus I needed to make the change.

It was the late spring of 1999. My brother had recently died (July 4th, 1998). My mother had even more recently survived a minor stroke, which she had while in surgery, with doctors right there... talk about synchronicity. In the fall of 1997, I had been stalked and threatened in the course of my job. This situation had led my wife and I to have to spend a weekend in a hotel and have police protection for a week and then a restraining order. A student was expelled from the high school where I was teaching at the time over the incident. It was an ugly scene. In the fall of 1999, some students stole nearly a thousand dollars of fund raising money from my office. They even made a videotape of them opening the locked kevlar bank bag they stole and counting the money. My principal still accused me of stealing the money, even with solid evidence to the contrary. One of the students was facing charges for mugging a customer outside his place of employment and needed the money for his legal problems.

What caused all this misfortune? Its simple. At the end of the summer of 1997, I had made one simple statement. I said, "I think I will stay here at this school and make a career of it." What a mistake that was. My life was turned completely upside down for the next several years. God, the universe, whatever you call it, wanted me to enter a new stage of my life and, as I recently told a friend, when God wants you to move, he doesn't just gently prod you in the right direction. He tends to slap you in the face, grab you by the shoulders, and give you a good shove. Otherwise, we would never move. Yet fear and the rose-colored lenses of memory were keeping me rooted in place. I remember the day when it happened though. It was a clear day in early April, 1999. I was driving to work when one of my favorite songs came on the radio. It was A Long December by Counting Crows. The final line of this familiar song brought the sudden sting of tears to my eyes: "Its been so long since Ive seen the ocean. I guess I should." Wow! Talk about powerful. My parents lived at the beach and I had been considering moving closer to them so I could be close and help them through their health problems. After all, my mother's stroke had happened less than a month before. That was it. I decided instantly to pursue the job which I am now strongly considering leaving.

I have felt the strong pull of synchronicity in my life once again. I guess I'm just waiting for that "Eureka!" moment that speaks to my soul. This job has served me well. Ever since my first teaching job, I have felt strongly "called" to each position I have held. Now I feel called to seek out the next thing. I have no idea what it will be. As I have already said, I love books and music. I have always wanted to be a writer. I have considered enrolling in a program that would lead to an M.S. in Mental Health Counseling. I'm not sure where I am being led or "called" next. I have some vague feelings about where I am supposed to end up, but maybe my subconscious mind doesn't want to admit those feelings to my conscious mind just yet.

Now I need to find a way to exorcise these memories that hold me in place and "send away the ghosts that haunt me now" (Crash Test Dummies, Ghosts That Haunt Me). Its bad enough to have to face the fear of the unknown, but to have to do it with the ghostly voices of memory constantly whispering in my ears makes it nearly unbearable.

"The price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings."
- Counting Crows, Mrs. Potter's Lullaby