Revisited: a Short "Movie" of a Family Camping and Climbing Trip

(This post may contain affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links and make a purchase, I’ll receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the channel and allows us to continue to make videos like this. Thank you for the support!)

“Living in the past.”

That’s a phrase we’ve come to use derogatively to describe someone who can’t move on with their life: “That person is living in past!”

But there is a difference between being “revisited” (the title of this short movie) by the past and being stuck in the past. See, I am a big believer in revisiting the past. Personally, the lessons I’ve pulled from past experiences tend to morph and change over time as I add on new experiences. That run in with a bully when we were five, the one that taught us to stand up for ourselves comes to mean something else when we are fifteen and find ourselves standing up for someone else who is being picked on. The former is about self-respect. But after experiencing the latter, maybe it was all about respecting humanity - ours and everyone’s.

I’ve been writing a lot, recently. Not just here. And one of the things I’ve been struck by through my process of writing is how old experiences of my past can be threaded through with a common theme when combined together. Sure, that’s little more than the old adage that “life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards.” But what it also has meant to me is that I am constantly changing my understanding of what has been of significance in my life. Some things that glossed over me (or maybe which I glossed over) in the past have come to say so much more when combined with the “pattern” of similar events that I’ve come to experience. And in the inverse, things that seemed profound at the time have come to feel mundane.

I don’t find the rehashing of my personal history to be counter-productive; rather, I find it to be sometimes healing, sometimes invigorating, and sometimes unsavory but constructive as I try to continuously better myself and the development of my character.

Yes, people can get stuck. I’ve been stuck for periods of time in my life. That’s different. That isn’t using the past as a springboard into the future. But the notion of being “ever forward,” losing the willingness to self-examine and reexamine, seems like only living half of an experience. Each experience has its present moment but then also the memory of that moment. And the memory is (if we let it) the “gift that keeps on giving,” imparting new truths if we only are willing to take the time to explore how our relationship with our own past evolves over time.