Another thing when my "cool" coach and I talked about during our dinner the other night was our mutual friend whom we admire very much. We both know he is the way he is because of the characteristics he was born with, and the family he was born into. We feel he is the way he is now because he over compensated for his weaknesses.
I was thinking of how he kept all the things that he cared about, things he collected during the course of his life. He moved from Kansai to Tokyo, but he brought with him just about all the "stuff" full of his past. How can he hold onto his past so much, and be able to embrace now and future with abandon? If he wants to live and love freely, he has to let go of his past. But I realized it requires herculean effort for him to be able to do that.
Looking back, I realize it was easy for me, because I didn't have any choice. I couldn't keep the stuff that reminded me of my past, because I had to move on without my precious things like momentos, books, diaries, records, photographs. First was when my mother decided to run away from Kagoshima to Tokyo. One day, she asked me if I would die with her. I immediately said no. I felt from the way she was acting, this is really serious, and I'd better not mess around. Then she just said, "Let's go." I was 8-years old, so I just followed. The second was when we moved to England. I was 11-years old, and we couldn't take much with us. When I divorced, I left everything behind. When I came back to Japan with my son, I only brought with me minimal things. Now living in a cramped, noisy 90m2 apartment as a family of 6, we don't have much space to accumulate things.
Everytime I had to let go, I felt so displaced. It felt desolate and lonely. But because I had to let go completely, I had to create comfortable world within the new world in a hurry to stop feeling lonely. By doing so, I had no room to worry about keeping in touch with my past. What fit best with now? What mattered for me and my son's future? And that is how I ended up choosing where I am now. Maybe it can't even be called choosing. It was series of relatively easy selection process. If there was a rule in starting over, it would be to stay as true to my heart as possible. What is right or wrong by world's standard is "more like a guideline". What felt right for me meant whether my course of action would help someone grow, and would help myself grow.
I have been meaning to talk about this to Wyuki-san for a while now, about re-making the past experience. This is not about painting over the feelings I had in the past. It is all about learning of other factors in my life that made me who I am. In the case of starting over, each time, especially in younger years, I felt angery for having to go through it, dismayed with my fate. I just didn't know at that time it was a valuble lesson I was learning, in how to let go, how to make the best out of what has been given me.
My friend, not having had such experience as I did, would find it hard to take that one step to start over. First, he has to let go of the past and the present that is the continuation of the past.
My coaching friends and I talk about ... coaching. Would my story help someone in starting over? Would it matter?
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