Creatingtheclouds Part5

CREATING THE CLOUDS By Randyl Longmire

Part V

“Using the Past to Create Today’s Upsets” Just like learning to drive a car by looking through the windshield at the turns and obstacles ahead, you’ve learned to be sucFHVVIXODQGFRQ¿GHQWE\ORRNLQJ to the future in preparation for things to come. We are now working from a different paradigm, which will take even more practice to embrace. We are learning to look to the past for obstacles and barriers that have previously caused upset and failure. We will focus on past upsets, embellish the stories surrounding them, and even blame them for future disappointments. You could say that we are learning to drive while looking only in the rearview mirror. In doing so, we become oblivious to the future that continues to hurtle toward us. This causes a chain reaction of chaos, unpredictability, and general hopelessness. Dwelling on the problems of the past also allows us to revisit the feelings of stress, anxiety, sadness, and even pain that were experienced before. Although the events are long over, our memory can manifest the experiences remarkably well, and even embellish them a bit. Look to your own past for parts of your stories that bring forth feelings of sadness or diminLVKHGFRQ¿GHQFH,I\RXDUHKDYing trouble pinpointing an area of past upset due to common memory-repression, start with general scenarios like school, home, or friends, and begin narrowing your focus from there. Once you discover a memory that brings up “negative’” feelings, focus on that memory and even try intensifying the experience by adding details that make the emotions surrounding the memory more extreme. This focus on the past not only allows us to be blindsided by the future as it continues to unfold, it allows us to blame the past events for these apparently reoccurring upsets. We are narrow-

focusing creatures, so whatever LVLQRXUOLPLWHG¿HOGRIYLVLRQDW any moment is naturally an easy target for blame. Learning to drive while watching the rearview mirror, we learn to blame whatever we see in the past for our continued head-on collisions. Blaming the past for our current and future problems is a simple way to become a helpless victim. You can’t change the past, but you can blame it for your present discouragement. For this reason, dwelling on the past is an excellent tool for diminishing your unwanted sense of personal power and responsibility, along with any perception of what you might be capable of achieving in the future. The belief that predicting the future is possible by looking into the past is a key element of causing and maintaining upset. Take, for example, the war in Iraq, from the media to the water-cooler comparisons with the failures of the war in Vietnam that have been made. In bringing our attention to the upsets of the past, we are re-creating the same experience around our current circumstances. Our mind brings the upset from the past into our present and even out into our future. The news media has been exercising these tactics for decades, so it may not come as naturally for you at ¿UVW,ILWGRHVQ¶WRULIWKLVZKROH column makes no sense to you so far, use that as a way to feel discouraged and personally unable to grasp what others seem to comprehend easily.

Keeping Others Out of Your World One of the biggest threats to avoiding peace and joy in your life is found in the relationships one has with others. While most of your friends will readily

support your feelings of hopelessness, some altruists have a tendency to give you good advice and are heaven-bent on bringing you out of your newlyattained depression. These people gain their empowering qualities through the use of compassion, empathy, acceptance, and grace - qualities that FDQEHGLI¿FXOWWRFRPEDWLI\RX are not weak-willed enough. I will give you one method that is often overlooked: Don’t speak to these people. They gain their power through keen listening skills, and if you don’t speak, they are left guessing as to what they are supposed to be compassionate and empathetic to. They lose their effectiveness when you do not let them into your world. Through techniques of selfdeprecation, blame and negativity, dwelling on the past, and lack of communication, your life can be shaped into one that you consistently hate. Using the methods you’ve been discovering in the course of this column, you can bring distance to your relationships, failure where you had success, despair where there was hope, and once again regress into the endarkened state of mind you once feared. With perseverance, you will soon be looking down again. You, too, can turn from blessing others when they sneeze to damning them for spreading communicable disease. Randyl Longmire is not a doctor. He is not a therapist. He has won no awards, and he has no standing in the academic world. +HLVJHQHUDOO\XQTXDOL¿HGIRU most professions, pursuits, hobbies, and athletic activities. The Word and its editorial staff are not responsible for any loss of life, self-esteem, or livelihood as a result of Mr. Longmire’s teachings, and we feel they are in poor taste.