How goes the 2022 thoughts and aspirations of hopeful change? Have you abandoned your plans of this year being the year you will ... [place intent here]?
I know that feeling as I suffered with "want-its" for years. I wanted to be sober and not drink every day, I wanted to be able to do more fitness-wise than I was doing, I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I wanted to feel better about myself. Well, you know what? Wishing and wanting doesn't make it so! I had to make it happen. Don't think this is easy!
I will be 63 in 2022 and the song by the Beatles "will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64" popped into my head this morning. At 63, who needs me? Who feeds me? Who cares what I do and when I do it? I wrote a column on that once and determined that I care. I keep looking from behind my own eyes wondering, what is life all about? Where does time go? Are we missing something?
In the cold, we need to get out and blow out the cobwebs. We are not bears that can hold up for the cold months and live off our fat (well, um, maybe we can … but don’t). We need to be out and about.
As a family, we met at a local park to get some air. Upon driving there, I met myself.
When I say I met myself, I met on the highway a black car, identical to mine. It was just as dirty and covered in salt and road spray. There was a lone woman in the driver’s seat, and we met on the same highway that I would have travelled to go out to the park. It made me wonder, are there other dimensions of time that travel along with us? While the movie Back to the Future Part 2 seemed like fiction, we have now passed the actual day the doc travelled to when he went to the future at the end of the movie. Is time a construct that we create?
As I put resistance into my backpack and headed out for my hike-kind of walk, this thought was on my mind. It is a cold morning. Very cold. However, I dressed warmly and just went anyway. I thought, if I get very cold, I will come home! The resistance in my pack is in the form of two weights. Since I run when the weather is good, I find it hard to run in the cold. Therefore, when I walk, I never feel as challenged. I added the weights into my pack, 14 pounds total, to create the challenge I need. I made myself heavier, challenging my heart. I changed the dynamic for exercise purposes. Do we add weight and change to create challenge in our lives? Do we meet ourselves coming back from poor choices?
Going to the park or completing 5 km listening to a good book, I create a memory. Some memories are real, and some are fiction, as we distort, delete and generalize much that happens in our day to day. No memory is 100 per cent accurate. It has been proven that “eye-witness” accounts are subject to being incorrect. Everyone’s eye-witnessing is subjective, and the details retained are personal. Think about that one!
As I met myself coming back and entertained this notion, it sent me down a rabbit hole of making things right. If we can meet ourselves coming back, can we make right what has been wronged in the past? We can. It is the ripple effect that we cannot change because it involves much more than ourselves. That is why forgiveness is challenging. As we let go of our own foibles and begin to make right our own world, we are met with resistance and challenges that are not our own. Marty could not interact with himself in the past, coming from the future, because the future ripples would change life as he knew it in the future. We saw that as his mother began to fall for him instead of his father. He began to disappear.
When we return to our past mistakes to make them right, we change the lives of others along the way, and they may not be as willing or able to be with us. As we meet ourselves coming back or coming around, while we change the future by letting go of the past, it is a solo journey and we have no control over how others will accept the forgiveness we grant ourselves. This is where divine forgiveness enters our heart. When we come into the vibrational energy of knowing divine perfection, that all is right in the world, no matter what has happened, we see things very differently. Life is lived with mistakes and with challenges. Putting 14 pounds into my backpack creates weight I carry for a time and then I take it out, let it go, and recognize it is weight I need not carry for the rest of my days.
When have you met yourself coming back? When have you seen where you can forgive and lessen the heavy burdens you carry, only to realize doing so means you must leave others behind? Where can you let go of the pain you carry and believe the encouragement of others who have been there to lift you up? Time is a construct and, given the chance, can stand still or be glorious.
Making the resolutions in the New Year shows how timing is everything and it can be nothing. Adding weight to a backpack, or to your body, can be temporary when you look at the weight and put it down or let it go. We all have a choice. The right to choose to be happy and to watch ourselves from afar and make the changes we need to make for our future self. Let go of the extra baggage you carry. Set it down, shed it, or simply let it go.
Cynthia Breadner is a grief specialist and bereavement counsellor, a soul care worker and offers specialized care in Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy with special attention as a cognitive behavioral therapy practitioner and trauma incident resolution facilitator. She volunteers at hospice, works as a LTC chaplain and is a death doula, assisting with end-of-life care for client and family. She is the mother part of the #DanCynAdventures duo and practices fitness, health and wellness. She is available remotely by safe and secure video connections, if you have any questions contact her today!
