On the Road

Traveling at the speed of life.

I just returned from an eight-day road trip through Canada, traveling 2,600 miles to retrieve childhood memories and settle my past. What did I learn? That our reality depends on how/what we choose to see. I’m pretty sure everyone is experiencing their own personal reality, on this basis. And, memories can get in the way.

I was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I left at age 19 and never returned. This past week, I stood outside my childhood home, went back to school at Crescent Heights, overnighted with my best friend at school. I drove through mountain passes and visited the area where my parents retired. I stood outside the home I built with my dad, remembering cutting boards and staining beams. I closed my eyes and breathed in the memories: Hot summers, swimming in the lake, gorging on cherries, singing around campfires.

It was all spectacular. Events, family and friends, landscapes. The memories emerged like songs on a play list.

To begin my odyssey, I attended a memorial service for an early mentor with friends I hadn’t seen in 30 years. A few of them told me stories about us back in the day and I learned that I was, apparently, a much kinder person than I remember being.

What’s up with that?

Story after story revealed how these old friends remembered me caring about them, through various small acts of kindness. Their memories were much more vivid than mine and I found myself needing to re-calibrate my sense of who I’d been back then. And I began to wonder, thinking about writing this out for you, whether this might be true for you as well and, if so, why would that be?

Here’s my best thought: what if the growing negativity in the world at large is capable of affecting even how we remember our personal past? What if our memories change as we see the present world differently? There’s so much to worry about these days, so much fear broadcasting as wars and fires and conflicts rage.

I imagine that all of us could benefit from taking an internal road trip to visit our memories and choose to see them differently. I know my audience here so I feel confident to suggest that you too were probably a better person back then, better than how you may remember yourself.

The fundamental truth here is that all of us are creating our experienced reality, day by day, moment by moment. We all have history, memories of ourselves and others in events both positive and negative. Just as some of us create intentions about our future, goals we’d like to reach, perhaps we could use the same process on our past, reviewing our memories and adjusting them so they serve our ongoing growth and happiness.

It’s not dishonest to re-assign emotion to memories by seeing them differently. What lives now as a wound can become a healing instrument; all it takes is changing how we view it and what we decide it means.

Example: I constructed a stone patio at the home we built for my parents to retire into. Inexperience guided me to screw it up in various ways and the result was not as originally envisioned. But what I created was unique. We enjoyed it for twenty-years, as the new owners of the home do now. So, I reviewed that memory and replaced shame with a healthy pride. Actually, I didn’t “screw up;” I just did something different, something unexpected.

You might want to think back to discover any memories that anchor to emotions that darken your life today. We all have some of those. If you’re haunted like that, consider this process, to recreate your past as a solid foundation for what you are building now. You did your best, as did I. Let’s celebrate that, both to resolve what may obscure the value present in our past and to avoid sabotaging our dreams for the future.

This is life, it’s what we make of it!