Memories Of A Past Life

Has anyone ever had this feeling before? You are going about your day, a fairly mundane one at that. Then, something happens, something that would be pretty insignificant to anyone else, and a flood of memories washes over you.

This happened to me this afternoon. I was getting ready to do some chores. I was looking through some CD's to choose which one to pop in to make the chores a little less tedious. I came across an old CD of mine. It's really damaged for reasons I won't go into, so I haven't even tried to listen to it in ages. I put it in, and to my surprise, my favorite song on that CD skipped very little. Instead, I found myself standing there in front of the CD player with the mid-afternoon gray haze coming through the window shades, the melody singing straight to my heart. I stared for several seconds, suspended in time. I felt like each note was propelling me farther and farther into a past life: a younger life, a life that was so full of energy, pure hope, and a future that was joyously unsure. My eyes started to moisten, as I realized that the person living the life when I had last listened to this song and heard it the way I did just then, might as well have been a different person altogether. I realized this moment was full of emotion, and I didn't want it to pass. I wanted to let the feeling linger just a bit longer.

As the moment passed, I felt as though I was waking up from a dream, the best kind of dream: one that was in all actuality, real. I was then reminded of a line written by Thoreau, "Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake." What makes a dream a dream? To me, it's simply something you never want to end. It brings you unmeasurable amounts of joy. It is an all-encompassing feeling of peace and awe. So, if living is being in "dreams awake," I have not been living lately. Yes, of course, I get up each morning, I go through the motions of doing the things I have to do and know I should do, but I realized that I have not felt the truly mystical feeling of joy beating in my heart for some time.

Often times, I think our lives here on earth are somewhat really a series of lives. We go through vastly different stages, marked so completely distinctly from the ones before and after, that they could subjectively be called different lives. Though we do not literally die and become reborn over and over, certain things and events and feelings in our lives do. We move on and away from tragedy, uncertainty, loves, losses, and sometimes, happiness. I had been given this time-traveling experience as a gift. One of my past lives was surfacing to remind me of what true happiness feels like.

It is a human reality that we must constantly be working for happiness; it does not just fall into our laps. I know for sure, I have grown lazy at times toward cultivating the vast fields available to me that are lined, row upon row, with lavender and sunflower happiness. So, as jarring as the experience of a beautiful voice resonating in the simplicity of a Monday afternoon bringing me to a place that I felt had been neatly folded and tucked into the past may have been, it helped me realize, or maybe remember, that we don't have to put our happy moments in the past or the future. We live each moment now, do we not? Then why am I not living each one as though it's the best moment I've ever had? It is my resolve to do this as much as possible from here on out. Maybe someday, I'll see, hear, smell, feel something that reminds me of this period in my life, and I will be so overcome with joy, I will truly be glad to have chosen a path of harboring hope and the indescribable feeling that makes each of us eager to feel our feet hit the ground every morning.