I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be, you’re gonna give your love to me,
I will love you night and day, know our love not fade away

I spent the greater part of the morning poring over old photos. Most of them were from the seventies and the eighties, when I was a little more reckless than I am today. It was great reliving those memories, and it was even greater now wallowing in the past, wishing to return to something that was so long ago.

It’s easy to do, isn’t it? We see a snapshot of ourselves when we were younger, with good friends we haven’t been in touch with for so many years, and we want at least a part of it back. We want to return to a certain innocence that we believe is still possible.

I think the better thing to do is reclaim that innocence that is still with you. The old, fading pictures have done a fine job of freeze-framing a moment for us to remember, but we are too quick, I believe, to think that the goodness within that picture is, for some reason, locked in that past.

I dare say, nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, it is locked up within you, longing to be released again and cherished as a part of who you are.

From time to time, I have a debate with some good friends who have weathered a few decades with me. It goes something like this:

Good Friend (GF): You can’t live in the past. You have to discard those old shells like a crab molting, getting bigger, stronger by shedding the old, dead skin of its former self. You meet new people, grow up, gain new experiences, and too many of them have nothing to do with the relationships and experiences you had in the past.

ME: But those relationships are possible because of those past experiences. Let’s consider ourselves grapes for a moment, shall we? Let’s just, for the sake of argument, make the assumption that, one day, we will become wine. The distinctive taste of the wine is from a long heritage of grapes grown in that region. The grape does not become distinct when the process begins to age the wine; it relies on its history to become, eventually, a fine-tasting wine that is savored by many. If it weren’t for that grape’s past, it would be some generic, fermented drink that is corked and put out for sale. Even Aristotle believed that unfermented grape juice was a good wine’s childhood.

GF: You make a lot of mistakes in the past, though, and the only way to move on from them is to put them behind you, especially when you meet somebody new who doesn’t care about where you’ve been, as long as you don’t go back there again.

ME: There’s a difference between going back and preserving the essence of you. Nobody is suggesting you should shirk your current responsibilities to relive some moment in the past. I argue that the past defines who you are today, and you can’t let any individual enter your life with demands to make you discard that past for the sake of the relationship. From the day you were born, your experiences have been defining and refining who you are. I say, to your old, bad self: It’s all about the Not Fade Away. Refine, Good Friend. Refine like a good wine in the glory of ’09.

Well, maybe that last part was not said during one of our debates, but I say it to all of you on this, the last day of 2008.

Love yourself. Love your life. Love those in your life. Cherish the experiences captured in those snapshots and remember the aspects of you that you continue to refine. There’s no need to abandon the great times of the past; build on them, instead. Make the experiences in 2009 be as rich as the colors (or variations of gray!) in those old photos, and continue to refine the great person you continue to become. ☺

I am quite humbled by the fact that I am 43 and I continue to learn things about myself on a daily–sometimes hourly–basis. The funny thing is (and I do mean in the strictest of ha-ha ways) that the things I am learning have been common knowledge, I am sure of it, among my closest of friends for many, many years.

Yesterday, I learned that my inner critic (aka the judge, the censor, the watcher-at-the-gates…we all have one) feasts off of my emotions and seizes each and every opportunity to lash out against me when it senses the slightest instability in my emotions or in my wellness. I actually heard my critic launching its barrage of insults yesterday afternoon when I felt a little stuffed from a magnificent lunch.

The critic started in about my weight, how nobody could respect somebody so out of shape. It quickly followed with an onslaught of “who do you think you are” attacks, and within a minute or two, I started doubting my abilities as a writer, as a father, as a human being.

Crazy!

I stopped that critic in mid-attack, slammed on the mental breaks, and started laughing at the realization of how much control I’ve given to the inner critic. For years–maybe even my whole life, I have allowed that critic to persuade me that I am incapable of doing some of the things that I set out to do.

What’s most crazy about this is that I teach my writing students about the inner critic and how it can stop you from being a better writer. But what I realized yesterday is that the inner critic does not limit itself to attacking my writing (this I have known for years); my inner critic is, well, unbiased when it comes to matters worth judging. Apparently, every aspect of who I am is fair game.

Or should I say….was fair game.

After that brief but powerful epiphany yesterday, I feel more empowered than ever to reach my goals. Traditionally, I would have had a relapse (such a loaded word, but I think appropriate here) and would have had to rebalance myself in other ways (diet, writing, exercise). But just recognizing the inner critic and sending it away (realizing its existence was more than enough to send it off, scowling) was enough to resume my focus for my writing, my teaching, my living.

I often cite this quote (it’s one of my favorites) from Henry David Thoreau. But when I do, I  apply it to others and the ways in which they let the smallest things in life slow them down:

“Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.”

I imagine my critic sitting in a tree above me, tossing little nutshells and mosquito wings in my path, watching me be bothered and derailed so easily. It’s nice to know that, now in my life as much as in my writing, I’ve got my critic under my control, and I won’t be so quick to let it invade my focus or my emotions.

Give It A Try…

Take a moment and think about who the critic is within you. How often does it make an appearance and try to derail you and take you away from success? Where are the cracks in your armor that it seeks out? Write about those weaknesses and then, with the utmost authority, draft a letter to your critic, informing it that you are now in control, and it will be summoned when you need it, and not a minute more.

The family sleeps still. It is a little after 8 a.m., and just as is the case every year, my children finally succumb to the need for rest and let go of the anxiousness of the season.

It has been a busy few weeks. They need the rest, and I cherish the quiet to read and to write.

I just finished reading John Grisham’s Skipping Christmas, which was a fun, quick holiday read to keep my mind off the hectic happenings all around me. Now I’m immersed in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, and can’t stop turning the pages. This is a highly edited piece of writing, folks, that has cut out all of the fluff. She (or her editor) wastes no time with telling the story. It’s a style of writing that I can appreciate, but only in certain stories. This is one of them. I wonder if the remaining three books are written so concisely. . . .

This will be my challenge for the remainder of the break: To balance process with product. Time (as I’ve been given this morning) is the ideal way for me to manage the two with some measured success. The less time I have to work at this pace, the more I feel the paralysis working through me, until it’s all about lamenting about not having a process at all that might lead to any product.

My morning has been ideal: to multi-task at will between reading two books, writing both in my digital and paper daybooks, sketching abstract art, working on a 400-piece jigsaw puzzle, and cleaning up in and outside the house. All this in the last three hours since awaking a little before 5:30. When my family awakens in the next 30 minutes or so (I expect), I will be ready for the day with greater energy, patience, and outward loving for all of them. It is the best of all worlds for me.

I hope you have had a wonderful holiday. I’ll be around to friends’ blogs and facebook pages to see the updates and photos as the morning progresses. . . .