 Spiritual: March 23, 2016 Issue [#7549] |
  Spiritual
This week: Painful Memories Edited by: Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline  
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"Let it go," they say. If only it were that easy to move on from our mistakes.
This week's Spiritual Newsletter is all about the past, and our memories of our blunders and failures.
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"Let it go," they say (and not just in Frozen). The mistakes you made in the past. The hurt you might have caused others whilst doing so. Your blunders. Your embarrassing moments. They're done. It's over. There's nothing you can do about it now. Learn and move on. Let it go.
It's not that easy. At least, it isn't for me. Memories of all the above pop up at random moments, and I still feel guilt, or hurt, or pure, cringing embarrassment. It does not happen all the time, of course, but those experiences are still stored up in my brain and make themselves known every now and then. I figure that they float to the surface because they have not been dealt with properly.
How to deal with them? I don't know. I sure don't know how people who have done terrible things cope with it, because whilst I have indeed made mistakes, they are relatively harmless. Yet they make me feel bad enough.
The times when I have said the completely wrong thing at completely the wrong time. The times when I retreated into my bubble and made friends and family members feel like I was ignoring them.
The time when I was a child, away on a school trip. I was in a shop in a theme park, and they had these animal figurines. I loved two of them and only had money for one. I paid for one and walked off with both. As soon as I walked out of the shop, I felt horrible. I slipped back in and placed the unpaid-for one back onto the shelf. Why did I take it in the first place, though? It wasn't mine to take.
I was very close to the cat we had when I was a teen. He was ten when we adopted him. That cat truly trusted me. We were pretty much inseparable. When he and I were both 17, he suddenly became very ill. My parents and I knew that it was likely that he was too ill to recover. As he trusted me so much, I was the one to place him in the carrier to be taken to the vet. It turned out that he had cancer, and he was indeed put to sleep. Whilst it was probably for the best, to this day I feel awful for having betrayed his trust. When I think about it, I still get tears in my eyes.
Then there are all the many times when I didn't stand up for myself, and I should have. I often think about the right words to say when it is far too late. When in bed, I sometimes write long letters in my mind – letters that I will never actually write and even if I did, I certainly wouldn't send.
I am accident-prone. I remember knocking over a lit candle and it landed right on my grandmother's new couch which she'd saved up for for ages. The damage was minimal, but there was still a burn mark.
As you can see, my painful memories are of incidents that I cannot fix in the present day. Yes, some have been lessons. After that time when I took the figurine, for example, I never tried to steal something ever again, because not only did I know that it was wrong to steal, but I knew what it felt like to do so.
Yet, my mind insists on reminding me. Which leads me to feel that it can be easier to forgive others than it can be to forgive ourselves.
Am I alone in this? I doubt it. After all, as writers it's not uncommon for us to bring up painful incidents of the past, and not merely those we experienced at the hands of others.
Some recommend prayer. Others would recommend confession. Or, as said above, to simply let it go.
The truth is, the memories remain. You cannot force yourself to forget. I guess we're stuck with everything we've done, both good and bad.
Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline
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The Spiritual Newsletter Team welcomes any and all questions, suggestions, thoughts and feedback, so please don't hesitate to write in! 
ANN Counselor, Lesbian & Happy  - I love this. Perfection isn't even a dream, it's impossible. I do no find solace in religion because there's just too damn much judging in every religion. There are too many religions for me to now believe any of them, too many stories in all of them trying to teach people to be kind to others; but religious people are the most negative judgmental people in the world. Look at the Christians in America now who want to get rid of all Moslems!! That is horrorific and ugly and I want no part in it. Whenever people look at their heart and treat all other people with dignity without religious attitudes being so ugly, the world will be a better place without the need for hatred and wars caused by religious attitudes. I see a day when more and more people in future generations, burn all those religious books and look at their neighbor without religious judgements then life will be better for all. I say Down With All Religions, the sooner the better. Let the human heart survive with acceptance and kindness to other hearts alive in this very small world.
ann
I understand where you are coming from, Ann. I don't see religious people as negatively as you do, though. There's good and bad in every section of society. Like, my grandfather ran his own... not sure what to call it, church isn't the right word, it was a branch-off of the Salvation Army. He and the people there were all volunteers, doing a lot of good for people. They didn't care about gender, romantic preferences, faith, or lack thereof. Never tried to convert. If people needed them, they were there.
One night, a gentleman was in his final hours and there was nobody there to sit with him, so the hospital rang my grandfather. Now, my grandfather was a Christian, and the gentleman was a Muslim. But it didn't matter, for either of them. They soon found common ground, and both gained a lot from the experience.
That's how it should be, really. And that's where I do agree with you that it should all be about love, and acceptance, and kindness. Faith, or religion, or no faith or religion.
~~~
Pita - It's interesting to me you find order in spirituality.
I actually experience it in the exact opposite way, that my life is very well-ordered, and to me spirituality is one giant chaotic thing, especially in modernity, with the internet, and everywhere people approach spiritual and religion as a giant smorgasbord, take what looks interesting and avoid the messy bits. (Messy bits being things that require discipline and self-denial, like Lent and Ramadan.)
My life is ordered (I am an engineer) but all the chaos in it comes of and from spirituality. At this point in my life I have just accepted that there will always be confusion and questions, it comes of making a leap into the ether. I cannot characterize or catalog any of it. I feel sometimes like Jorge Luis Borges' Librarian in The Library of Babel.
Oh, I do agree with you. I think that faith/religion tries to bring order into chaos, but like you, I am filled with confusion and questions about it all. My own beliefs are all over the place. When I join religious debates, I usually get it from all sides. 
It is quite possible that I will never find the answer(s).
~~~
Quick-Quill  - Like a lot of things words are open to interpretation. What is love? Brotherly, lust, parental and pet love. Judging seems to have been lumped into one category. BAD!! Yet all it means is to form an opinion about something. Have the authority to do so.
The problem isn't the judging its the execution. What do you do when you go to buy fruit and vegetables? you judge and hope they are fresh and not rotten. Once you execute them you find out if you chose right. We are allowed to form opinions about people. Everyone does it. Its part of human makeup. What you do after that is what is good or bad. I may not approve of a thief's actions and never let them in the house. Yet as a Christian I would visit them in jail, talk to them about how to change their ways. We can love the sinner but not the sin. We may have to agree to disagree about a subject but remain friends. A Patch of Blue. What if one became friends and built a relationship with a person they never saw? Others judged. Read the book or see the movie
I agree with you that judging is perfectly human, and that it's what we do with our judgements that matters.
~~~
Wishing you a week filled with inspiration,
The Spiritual Newsletter Team
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