Last time we talked about the jagged nature of a DPN in real-time and tried to make ourselves feel better by thinking of the fact that only one path could have gotten you where you are today. To further illustrate that point, imagine this jagged line with two fingers holding the germ and two holding the incumbent reference point. If you could pull it out you would end up with a perfectly straight line, complete with nodal dots at all the important markers on that lineage. In fact, if you remove all the words and the legend, your timeline would be exactly like that of anyone else in the world.
How is your relationship to the past? You may think that you don’t think about it much, but I bet you have some degree of comfort or discomfort with time that is distant from you, whether ahead of you or behind.
I’ve spoken many times about various spectra which can be visualized as a plank atop a fulcrum of some kind. You stand astride the plank with a foot on either side and attempt to maintain balance in the middle. In this case, we might picture the future under our right foot and the past under our left. But this time, the plank is actually a full sheet of plywood, the fulcrum is a large ball, and you are in the middle, trying wildly to balance your traditional x-axis, between past and future, while also adjusting to the fact that in the y-axis you now have the added trouble of a new continuum! When you dip into the past, you continually rock between feelings of nostalgia and whimsy at the front, and guilt, grief, and remorse at the back. On the future side you’ve got to organize your balance between hopeful anticipation at the front and anxiety, terror, and dread at the back. It’s a wonder any of us stay neutral in the present day.
As you can envision with this illustration, once you roll too far to the back, and obsess over the darker days of the past, you are highly likely to see the future in a hopeless state as well. This image of a cyclical continuum may feel helpful when thinking of how to channel fear into excitement or embarrassment into performance.
As we learned last season, and have known our whole lives, there is nothing in the past that you can change. Even returning a DPN to refocus on the original goal will still not erase the changes that occurred in the meantime. And there’s really nothing wrong with that if we just realize.
For some, it may prove helpful to consider the Serenity Prayer of Reinhold Niebuhr which recognizes, in a way, our longing to discern the things that are set-in-stone and the ones we can still influence (whether current, past, or future).