We humans do not like reconciling with the past, unless we’re forced to. Pain often lies there, in making a true reconciliation with wounds, traumas, and the stories we carry about them.
Yet that reconciliation is what is so needed. Reconciliation means simply that it is no longer carried along with you. It is no longer a weight on everything that you plan and everything that you do as you move forward.
It is easy to just run forward into the future. “The future is brighter,” or so they have often told us. Yet if we look around today, is the future bright?
It can look dark because there is darkness and heaviness in the things that are unreconciled. They are like little anchors, weighing the boat down more and more.
This is true individually, and true collectively.
We have not reconciled with how we got here, which makes going somewhere better impossible.
It is not surprising, then, that New Year’s resolutions are a losing proposition. A new resolution to lose 30 pounds, or to eat better, or to be kinder to others is already burdened by the weight of past resolutions left unmet.
This is no call to live in the past. The action of life is always in the present.
Yet if that present is filtered and limited by a mind and body unable to be fully here—because of hidden emotional anchors to the past—then the present cannot be as full, alive, and powerful as it could be.
New Year’s Eve is a time to reflect on the year, and more. To reconcile with questions like: Where did I feel hurt? Where did I hurt others? Where did I let myself down? Where did I let others down? Did I give my power away by seeing myself as a victim—or did I stay connected to it?
Reconciliation is not blame.
It is not self-punishment.
Reconciliation happens when you stop letting your inner state be tied to your history. It happens when the wound, the pain, or the trauma is released.
You take responsibility for what you carry. Not because it was your fault, but because you are the one carrying it, and only you can put it down.
Only when the weight of the past is released does forward motion stop repeating that past in new costumes.
Only then does the future stop being a promise, and start becoming real.
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