A few nights ago, I was watching Emmitt Smith’s story on Who Do You Think You Are.  As he was uncovering his ancestry, he said “history is not the past; history is my story” (or something to that effect).

That got me thinking.  So often, I hear the past is the past, but it’s not true.  The past is in us; it is us.  It shapes us and affects us – we are who we are because of it.

What we consider our past becomes the present, the future, and then the past again. It is fluid – creeping up when we least expect it.

On occasion, the past surfaces and dominates the present.  That happened to me today and it made me realize that I can never extricate myself from my experiences or the people with whom I shared them (for better or worse).  They are part of me  – I can’t escape them, or erase them, or even ignore them.

Everything that has happened to me up until this very moment has contributed to who I am, where I am, and with whom I share my life.  For that, I am grateful.  If given the chance, I would not change any of the bad, for fear of affecting the good.  However, there are some experiences that I never want to repeat and there are some people whom I never want to see, speak to, or acknowledge again. Ever.

I am certain that at some point in my future, my past will creep into the present and slap me in the face again.  When that happens, I will deal with it much as I did today.  Accept it, render it powerless, and move on.  Eventually, it might stop creeping up, creeping in, or creeping, in general.  One can hope, anyway.

I have always believed that two people in the same situation at the same time experience (and remember) it differently.  People perceive things differently, interpret things differently, and remember the pieces that are important to them, good or bad.  No two people have the same experience.

A strange thing happened to me the other day that confirmed this for me.  I got home after lunch with a friend and realized that I had missed a call on my cell phone.  There was a message.  I listened to the message and could hear strange background noises.  Curiosity kept me from skipping and erasing it.  I heard my friend’s voice – the one who I had been with for lunch.  I heard her placing her order at the restaurant and realized that she must have called me accidentally while we were out.

I listened to that message for 3 minutes and nothing, not one thing, sounded even vaguely similar to the lunch I remembered sharing with my friend.  It was surreal.  I even heard my own voice and didn’t recall saying what I heard.

What her phone ‘heard’ and mine recorded was vastly different than the experience I remembered having only moments before – and that doesn’t even take into account the perceptions, interpretations, and assumptions that people make.

The whole thing was just surreal.  She and I had parallel experiences that, at the time, we thought we were sharing.