Our past is like a pomegranate.
From the outside, it can feel like one monolithic thing, but if you crack it open, there are a hundred shiny, juicy seeds full with so many things. Dreams, memories, people, experiences, traumas, joys, regrets, suffering, and serendipitous accidents. Our story about our past. Our story about our future. You authored some of this. Other things just happened.
Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, once said: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our freedom and our growth."
It's that space -- holding space for that space -- that can fork your life into two different humans. And most of the time, we don't see it. I know, I didn't, for most of my life.
When there is space, there is power to choose. We don't react. We respond. And, how we respond to whatever happened becomes the author of how you experience today, the decisions you make tomorrow.
If we are broken in some way by some external event from our past, and we don't create the space to choose to heal, we imprison ourselves in certain ways. What we don't repair, repeats. The wounds we don't heal recur in the same patterns of our behavior. We don't see because we are the behavior. You can see with the benefit of hindsight.
It took me, probably, way too long to really understand how important this space between stimulus and response is. It takes discipline to hold space for that space because the power to choose is the soul of super important things like our happiness, our freedom. If you've experienced trauma, that experience doesn't have to be a cage forever. It can be a catalyst for positive things.
All the ingredients for us to grow are within us, in the pomegranate of our past. When we are ready, we can crack it open, and let the seeds breathe. This is easier to write than to believe, and it's easier to believe than to embody. But, that's why we're here. Trying.
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