"No matter how fast I run I can never seem to get away from me."

"Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him." - Friedrich Nietzsche

My title today is from Jackson Browne's Your Bright Baby Blues. Lately, I have seen several others tackling the issue of dealing with, and ultimately escaping their past. Actually, I think the word "escape" oversimplifies this concept and is a virtual impossibility. The best words I have seen to explain it is the quotation that Loz used on his blog.

"All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life." - Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

Obviously our past is something we are powerless to change. There are many things in our past that we may not be proud of. We are all too painfully aware of the many and myriad mistakes we have made throughout our life's history. The only thing we can do is to live our present and future life in such a way that indicates that we have overcome our past weaknesses and failings.

“Men are born to succeed, not fail.” – Henry David Thoreau

The desire, as expressed by these two excellent writers (here and here), is to reach that point, as Richard Ford says, where the past can tell us nothing more about ourselves. The point at which we have examined our actions and experiences and have learned all that they have to tell us about who we were, and ultimately, who we are. Since we are the product of all of our past experiences, this may be an extremely difficult point to reach, if it is even reachable.

Most people seem to run hand-in-hand with their past, never quite conscious of what it tells us about ourselves, until they reach that point of reflection and self-examination that many people call a "mid-life crisis." Thanks to the input of several of my wonderful readers, I have quickly come to instead call this experience the "second-life awakening." At this point of awakening, we often take stock of all that has gone before and, whether it's conscious or subconscious, make an accounting of our lives. Often, we find ourselves lacking.

"The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become." -- Charles du Bois

We who are beginning to embark on our second life can be our own harshest critics. We hold ourselves accountable for our failings and shortcomings. We look at how we have treated others and fallen short of being the people we now know we could have been. We are becoming. We are trying to shed the baggage of our past. We are atoning for our past wrongs and looking to move forward, unburdened by these failings. While we cannot change the past, we must release our regrets and forgive ourselves for the mistakes of our past, knowing that the person who made those mistakes is no longer who we are.

“You have to know the past to understand the present." - Carl Sagan

I don't think we can ever block out the past, for it informs our existence every day. Without the frame of reference it provides, we are doomed to repeat all of our failings; relive all of our worst memories. What we strive for instead, is to reach the point where that past self has been put away. The point at which we can come to terms with the things we did in that life, but not to allow it to define our future capabilities. We want to transcend the person we once were and be reborn into this second life clean, awakening unfettered and free of the shackles of our past. While it is true that all of our experiences define us, at this point we can begin to create new experiences and new memories, armed with self-awareness and the impetus to redefine, or at least clarify, ourselves and our lives.

"Look not mournfully into the past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future, without fear." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Is there a point at which our past can no longer teach us anything about ourselves? I'm not sure that exists, because when we reach the distant horizon, we arrive with the experiences that have become our new past. We look ahead and see that the horizon still stretches in front of us. We are constantly evolving and assimilating our new past, filled with new memories. Hopefully, we are gradually refining ourselves so that this new past is much more acceptable to our current views of what it means to be who we are. So, while we cannot totally escape that which has gone before, we can shape it anew with each day that passes into history.

"With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame." - George Eliot