Life is a journey. You start it when you’re born and end it when you die, and for that time in between, there is neither departure nor arrival. Just another day floating down the river of time which relentlessly bears us forward towards oblivion without mercy or consideration.

And no matter how badly we want it to, it can never stop or go backwards. Time only goes in one direction, and that is forward. To cling to the past is to place oneself at the mercy of what is to come in favour of facing backwards and pretending the future isn’t happening.

But the future will happen whether we like it or not. The only use of the past is to guide us towards a better future. We need not worry about letting go of the past, for it will always be with us. It is, in fact, the foundation of the present, and we can no more escape it than a dog can run away from its tail.

Therefore there is no need to cling to it and keep it alive in our minds. Letting go of the past doesn’t mean forgetting it or killing that which was good in it.

It simply means that you have stopped pretending you can stop or reverse time, and you recognize that you will have a better tomorrow if you concentrate on today.

I have a hard time with that, because I have the equal but opposite problem : I tend to focus on the future instead of the present. My mind’s eye is tragically farsighted, and I too tend to be at the mercy of events because I see only the big picture made of big ideas with implications far into the future.

I suppose there might be some kind of marginal advantage to being future oriented over being stuck in the past. It certainly allows one to avoid a lot of (but not all of) the sorts of future-wrecking decisions that present oriented people are prone to, and we can at least see and avoid the kind of potholes that the past oriented people fall into.

But it’s still a way to avoid having to be mentally present in the real world. It’s still escapism. And escapism taken to extremes is a deadly trap, where one responds to problems by mentally escaping into one’s preferred mode of distraction, thus ignoring reality and making more bad things happen in the future.

At some point, the cycle has to end. You have to Be Here Now and stay with something in the present long enough to see it through. Escapism is an addiction, and therefore a very hard habit to break. I am nowhere near shaking it yet.

But I make progress.

Of course, sometimes we cling to the past, and sometimes the past clings to us. That’s how I feel about my life right now. I want to move on very badly, but my road to the future involves a lot of returning to my past in order to deal with all the emotions I shoved to the side for all those years.

And it gets very tiring sometimes. I wish I could just cut the ties that bind me to my terrible past and move on. But the only way I have found to be free of the past is to deal with it. Otherwise, like an unpaid bill, it’s just going to keep showing up and getting worse every single time. Might as well save yourself the hassle.

It doesn’t seem to be something I can do by thinking, though. Like I have said many times before, my answers do not lie in the circle of light cast by my powers of reason. Turning said light inwards accomplishes little. I can analyze myself all day and half the night, and I will come up with all kinds of explanations for why I am how I am.

But I won’t find any actual solutions. What progress can be made that way is geologically slow, like trying to use a glacier as a pepper mill. Counterintuitively (at least for a cerebral type like me), sometimes figuring things out rationally can be the longest and least efficient path. The mind in a more mystical mode can make connections directly, while slow and awkward reason has to take the long way to the same connection every single time.

One of the things I talked about in therapy yesterday was the cold hard path of life I am on. It is the path of the philosopher, the path which permits no delusions, no matter how much they might help. A path which demands evidence for all things and denies even the slightest bit of faith. A path that demands that things make sense, or be rejected.

And it all sounds good on paper. One can even paint a picture of oneself as a rugged truth warrior living the austere live of an epistemological ascetic, a stoic of the mind, forever denying themselves the worldly illusions that other, lesser beings cling to for comfort in favour of the long an arduous path of the truth-seeker.

But me, I would rather be happy.

Unfortunately, I have no choice but to travel this long hard cold road of mine because I am incapable of consciously accepting anything on faith. There’s just no room for that in my worldview. The entire structure of my mind is based on a logically consistent and contiguous set of beliefs which is always being updated, compacted, and integrated in order to make it as efficient and functional as possible.

Even the basic assumptions that underlie the entire structure and which are not, in and of themselves, rational are integrated into the larger structure in a logical way. And there is always the possibility that even those assumptions might get minimized or reduced by a superior structure with even fewer assumptions.

And all that is very very good…. for being right.

But there’s not a damned thing it can do about being happy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.