My intern came this morning.  We talked about his students and he wondered why they choose to do things that are going to get them nowhere.  I suggested we need to know each person’s story before we can figure out this answer, because the past lives in the present.

Every day we carry forward the beliefs and reactions we learned in our childhoods.  We aren’t really living right now free from our past.  That’s why when people move to make a “fresh start”, they just take their same problems to a new place: “doing a geographic”, they say in Alcoholics Anonymous.

“Well, if the past lives in the present,” my intern said, “then it should educate the present.”  This can be done by thinking/talking about our past.  Telling the story of okay You that starts the day you were born.  Write it down, say it out loud, tell it from the deepest level of truth, figure out what makes you tick, why you react the way you do.

The promise is that if we work on our past, clear up our past and see its effects on us, then our present will be happier.  Examine our lives so they will be worth living.