What I have learned recently about myself is I live in the past...a lot. Almost all the time. In fact, if my mind is left unattended you can be sure that I am stewing over something someone said or did to me at some point in my life. Or I am beating myself up over something I didn't say or do or something I did say or do that causes me regret and grief still, even fifteen or twenty years later.

What is that?!

I have also learned that every time I recall a painful incident from my past, I call it forth, recreating it as if it were happening again, right now in this moment. A moment that will be gone as soon as the next moment arrives. And if I'm only living in past moments, never to sit fully present in this moment, am I really living? To think of all that energy expended in just those memories alone. As a stay at home mom of three under the age of four, I wouldn't say I am overflowing with extra energy to burn.

For so many years, after my son died, I was not really living, nor did I care to be alive. Nothing excited me or brought me joy. That was my choice - not a conscious decision, but still a choice nonetheless.

I have friends who will sit in the past with me. Are they enablers? I know not. I'm sure I would sit in someone's past with them if that's the place where they felt most alive. Is that it? Do I sit in the past because that's where I feel most alive? When my blood boils and my heart sinks at the most painful memories I can muster, is that the way I feel something, anything?

For years, after my son died, I never felt alive. Something exciting could happen and I didn't truly care. A beautiful sunset would be pointed out to me and I wouldn't bother to look up. Who cares, I would think. Not me. Not the one with the dead son and the dead heart.

After a lifetime of high-bar drama at every turn, being in a marriage that is virtually drama-free can certainly make me feel like I'm sleepwalking. There are times I sincerely wish my husband knew his way around words and expressing himself so we could have a good knock-down drag-out screaming match. But no dice.

So I wonder if that may be a way for me to "feel" something, anything...by living in the past and recalling pain, heartbreak, anger, jealousy...

Hmph. I'm not really sure. I'm figuring all this out as I go. I have read The Power of Now and I'm trying to read it for a second time now that I realize I am still smack-dab in the past. And I have to say living in the moment seems to be the answer. In fact, I know it is. It's just going to take practice.... a lot of practice to break a lifetime of habit.

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us. ~Alexander Graham Bell

Today, I Vow to practice - in this moment - to stay right here where I am, knowing the past is safe and secure behind me.