Being Thankful for the Present
The Past Holds the Content for the Present to Engage the Future
Quite often in therapy the question gets posed as to how to deal with the past. Contrary to so many therapeutic experiences that people have, I’m not obsessed with reifying the past, since I don’t think “unearthing” things in a psychological form of archeological excavation is generally healthy or even helpful. Memories are reconstructions within a present context rather than recalled perfectly, and any desire for “healing” from the past is to stay fixated on the wrong time for solutions to one’s struggles. The past doesn’t contain truths, it instead holds content for our continual process of meaning-making and story-telling.
I describe the past as providing content that the present requires in order to prepare for, in hopefully an impressive level of good guessing, the future believed to be coming. The past is a tool to be used for whom the focus is moving in the only direction that is open to any of us, that of the future. Every moment that we live is a collapsing experience that brings us into the constantly unfolding future. But to consider that future, we should be ever increasingly mindful of the present needs, else we get lost in a moment, whether past or future, that we don’t actually reside in.
This getting lost is often what inspires the physiological response pattern of depression and anxiety. Depression is the normal and, to some degree warranted, reaction to the perceived inability to do anything to change something. Welcome to a preoccupation with the past. Anxiety is the normal and, to some degree warranted, reaction to the perceived uncertainty of a future that isn’t felt to be prepared for. Welcome to an obsession with the future.
Consider the relationships unfolding here for a moment. For all the time and resources spent preparing for a potential future, it will never be more than what was possible in the present. For all our lamentations and considerations about the past, it held within it the potential of the present we're experiencing. The past and future are indelibly connected to what the present holds or becomes, yet we typically spend more time considering either than being thankful for the moment we currently reside in.
Bring to mind driving and, if that doesn't have too many anxious associations, remember a time when you suddenly 'woke up' and realized several miles had gone by without full conscious awareness. Whether it was a focus on what was coming, that meeting or event, or what had happened previously, a missed opportunity or action unfulfilled, the present in which all that thinking was occurring slipped on by without your noticing. What sights were missed? Who passed us by? What dangers did we ignore? An entire section of life, a whole area of living, passed in a blur of contemplating everything but what was happening right in front of us.
Without a clear sense of where we currently are it is profoundly difficult to engage in that nourishing practice called gratitude, being thankful for what is. Rather than simply a declaration said over the dinner table or engaged in on Thanksgiving, gratitude can be a lifelong practice reminding us to not lose sight of what's directly around us.
The past is a recall of events seen through the lens of our current situation, removing us from contemplating what we already have. The future is a projection of our current hopes and concerns, removing us from consideration of our current situation. Both cast our vision away from the grounded reality of our current relational self, the very structure of our conscious experience that holds the potential to travel these roads in different ways. Think of turning a telescope to look upon a night sky, it is precisely where the lens or present is located that will determine what is seen through the other end. If we forget how powerful the present is, we may never shift our imagination to contemplate the rest of the sky above.
To be thankful is, to begin with, Value, the identification of what we hold to be important. It is to recognize our capacity to care, to connect, to hold the strings of our relational lives in our mind's eye. To pause in that relational present, to refrain for just a moment from losing ourselves in the past or future, is to hold the now and everything it contains. That now provides all manner of lessons to be learned from what has come before and a growing list of potential outcomes out of what has yet to happen. It is precisely within the universal human process of Value-ing that gratitude springs eternal.