All About Yesterday

I think a lot of us have a reservoir of things from the past that cause us sadness, if not actual regret, if we think about them much at all. We "try not to dwell on them." It's pretty easy to unexpectedly get reminded of someone or something from the past and then find your day shot through with feelings that have nothing to do with anything that's happening right now at all. People always say you need to move on. You can move on, but you always take the past with you inside, wherever you go. Many of us get through hard life stuff by using creative outlets. One of the disadvantages of this method is that, years after, even if the creative work has been destroyed, that difficult experience was once given some concrete, memorable form, and this stays with you. In my case, paintings, bits of writing and songs stay in my memory, long after I no longer want or need to think about the events that made me feel I needed to create them to begin with. The better they were, the more memorable they are, and the more they seem to connect to ongoing life stuff that continues to unfold. Even if I don't keep them around, years later, a bit of one may float into my mind, and these fragments tend to drag after them almost all of the details and bits of difficult things that they were once part of. People, places, conversations, things. This means that you can have a quiet, still day to live on the outside, while on the inside, you are all about yesterday.