Are You Willing to Change your address?
Written By: Theresa Chaze
Where do you live? Not physically but emotionally. Are you
in the present or are you stuck in the past? Has a preceding
event, for what ever reason, stopped you from moving forward to new
lessons and new experiences? Are your perceptions clouded by the
emotional storms you experienced or are you able to see the sunshine
of today? Are you able to see the mistakes of the past and learn
from them? Or do you follow the same old path and expect it to lead
elsewhere?
A few years ago, there was a TV series called Deep Space
Nine. It was a Star Trek spin off about a space station on the
outskirts of a wormhole near a planet called Bajor. The Bajorans
believed the wormhole was where the Celestial Temple of the Prophets
was located; the Prophets were their spiritual leaders or Divine
figures. When Captain Benjamin Sisko was assigned to command the
station, many on Bajor believed he was the Emissary that the
Prophets had been foretelling. Sisko didn’t want to believe the
prophecy until he found himself trapped in the center of the
wormhole, being questioned by the Prophets. They asking him where
he lived. Sisko didn’t know how to answer and the Prophets kept
taking him back to the death of his wife. Although he couldn’t have
prevented it nor was he responsible for it, he felt liable for her
death. They kept taking him back the same scene over and over; no
matter what Sisko did he could not save her. At the end of each
sequence, they again asked him where he lived. The point being that
when his wife died, he also cease to exist in many ways. He still
lived and did his duty, but he never moved past that event in his
life. Because he couldn’t move beyond the guilt and the grief, he
couldn’t accept the reality of his life in the now. Eventually he
learned the lesson they were trying to teach him and he was able to
move forward in his life.
The events or challenges don’t have to be major in order to
have an impact. Sometimes a simple thing can cause a sticky point
in your life. A ill spoken word or action, which causes person to
feel foolish or impotent, is enough to create a stop point in a
their life. Stop points are best described as the events or
situations that immediately come to mind during stressful times.
It’s the knee jerk response you have when you don’t have time to
think through your reaction. Like a tab point on a typewriter, the
response becomes instinctive to the point of loosing awareness of
the behavior. It is Sisko continually trying to save his wife even
though it was no longer a possibility. His every action from that
moment on was in direct response to that event until the Prophets
forced him to be aware of his behavior.
Many of us live life on that level. Instead of examining
and trying to understand a situation so we can it can be released,
we ignore the lesson and continue to create the same circumstances.
Until we see where we live, we can not change our address. In
addition, the longer we live there, the more difficult it will be to
move. The more ingrained the behavior, the less likely a person
will be open to change without an intervening force. For Sisco, it
was the Prophets. That’s great if you can get Divine intervention.
But for the rest of us, it takes being self aware enough to look at
the patterns in our lives. What situations do we continually find
ourselves in and how do we react? Do we always respond the same or
is it based on the immediate challenge? Until we change our methods
of living, we can not expect a different out come. There is a
saying–Although we can’t go back and make a brand new start, we can
start from now and make a brand new end.” What we experience in
the past, we can not change, however we can change how it influences
our future. The different will be when we learn from the past
instead of trying to live there.