I am not my past-

I continue to take refuge in the safety of separating who I am from who I have been and both of me from who we are going to become. Not limited by my past and all that -


That brings up another truly confusing thought~ If I am being confident that I can succeed and think and create and make things happen based at least partially on what I have done in the past then what happens when I create that separation between who I was and who I is? I am not entirely sure I understand how to bring the virtues forward without bringing the flaws. Yins and yangs and Newton's favorite legal restrictions and all that.

Hmmm- I am not terribly comfortable with this idea-

We are what we are! Dammit! I would not ever expect another person to carry my responsiblities. They are mine. I may not be who I was but I am certainly on that Mark's evolutionary chain . . . There is a problem with my semantics or my understanding or something- I know that I am not what I was. But . . . do we get to choose what we bring forward?

Again- there is a flaw here as it is clear that we aren't going to let everyone do that all the time- "ok, I know I used to be an ax murderer but I am not that person anymore" How then can we say, "ok, I know I used to be an irresponsible, disorganized, lazy, confused guy but I am not that person anymore" In fact, the idea of saying, "ok, I used to be a 5'6" tall blond woman with just about an average iq but now I am not that person anymore . . . I am a 6' tall brown headed man with an iq of 165 and the athletic skills of a decathlete" strikes me as being ludicrous.

I am struck with the idea that our belief system is not only limited by our past but it damn sure better be. The alternative is madness!

If we were once less human than we are now, then it follows that we are limited to some degree by what we came from? Who I am is the sum of all the ingredients of my past stirred by my ambition, my intellect, my dreams but aren't even those things the products of my past? I may dream of a better life but I don't dream of another reality - I may think better than I ever have before but my thinking is still limited by my capacity to do so- we can want to be more and even different and we can become those things but only as far in front of us as our experiences and natural gifts will allow us to see.