Have you had miserable days where the theme was ‘ghosts from the past?’ Days when everything is going well and ‘bam’! You are revisited by unpleasant memories that you have strived hard to forget. The past catches up and you cannot outrun it. It’s unfair. You would have toiled to face it then, but, why now? That thing was closed. Sealed in a box, or so, you believed. It briefly throws you off track and you can’t help but wonder, why? 

Revisits of unpleasant pasts are normal. You have to brave it. If you face a breakdown, right after you calm down, you need to brave it. Accept what reality has to offer and quietly move on. There is no time machine that can take you back and help you rectify. Things have happened for a reason and it’s best if you move on. No matter how hard it is, these are the cards that are dealt to you. You have to play it.

‘So, these revisits, are they unresolved ones?’ They usually are. The ones that ended in bad blood. Ones where a solution was not met and everything ended in a mess. Having said that, it doesn’t always have to be unresolved ones. The past that haunts us can be tragedies and losses that we have tried to move away from. We live our lives believing that we have made peace with an unhappy past and are left disturbed when it crops out of nowhere. 

As sad as it is, I am sure, It will get better with time. It may not completely vanish from our life. It will remain as an unpleasant memory tucked in some corner of our mind but that corner will be forgotten with years. Many say, “Keep yourself busy, you won’t have time to think.” Well, it is true to a certain degree, but often what happens is, when you are smooth sailing in this boat of life, the past comes to bite you – out of nowhere. It could be an object, a photo or an involuntary dream that would coerce you to go down that dark path. The one that you have been avoiding ever since the catastrophe. 

It makes me wonder if emotions could easily be controlled by a switch. One that will help screen out all the bad and unpleasant thoughts, whenever they creep up. Wouldn’t that make our lives easy to navigate, even though we screwed our past? Fun as that sounds, it may not be for our best. Wherever we are and whoever we have become today is a result of the experiences we have faced in our lives. Good or bad, incidents change you as you grow. It shapes your personality and the more hardships you face you are likely to grow wiser and mature (unless you fall to the ‘dark side’). Imagine, if you take a mature person and minus their experiences, you might be left with a person with no depth. (depth adds character, haven’t you watched movies?) Jokes aside, you get the gist, right? Whether you want it or not, a lot of things are not under our control, therefore, you cannot avoid every mishap from occurring in your life. We are left with no choice but to deal with it now and its aftereffects in the future.