Nature’s Renewal
Bent but not broken by wind and time
The Role of the Past in Our Future
Informal conversations with professional colleagues I’ve had for many years appear to agree: for most of the clients we’ve seen, their pasts are believed to over-determine their futures. In other words, most clients - and people, in general - tend to believe that the best predictor of their future lives involves what has happened to them in their past. I was neglected, so I will be neglected in the future. I have had digestive system pain, so I will continue to have it going forward. I was divorced, so I will continue to struggle to establish durable intimacy in the future. I was abused, so I will most likely be victimized again in the future.
It is hard to argue with the research, such as the famous Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) studies, which reveal that the more “adverse” events that occurred in someone’s early life, the more likely that person is to experience a host of mental and physical challenges later in life. What this research focuses on, however, are predispositions, not on guarantees or inevitabilities. It isn’t that the past determines our future. Rather, the past merely points us in a specific direction our future can take. Our past experiences powerfully orient us toward a difficult or painful set of learnings from our yesterdays that inform us of what could happen in the future. What is easily overlooked is that this learning from the past represents just one possible path to the future, one among many, and rarely the preferred path forward. When we begin to appreciate the difference between possible paths forward and probable or likely paths forward, we are finally free to forge new and more fulfilling options for how we want to live. Moreover, the exciting news is that the seeds for living a more satisfying future already exist within us. The key question is how do we chart a new course forward when old habits steer us toward what has already been.
Nature’s Growing Edge
Unlike many people, who get stuck in repetitive patterns that recreate the past over and over, nature follows a somewhat different model. Nature models resilient growth, adjusting and adapting to the past but rarely repeating it according to some ideal. Nature’s model for growth is one that has much to teach us all. Nature always has a growing edge. Every tree grows from the tip of where growth ended last year. Every bulb we plant in the ground doesn’t get preoccupied with last year’s season. It takes a measure of light and temperature and moisture conditions as they exist now and grow accordingly. Nature’s growing edge is defined by the here and now, and not by the past. Fields of grass have protected their roots beneath winter’s snow cover. The spring melt stimulates their growing edge to blossom. The resilience of the grass, mowed down weekly on our lawns, or chewed to the nub by millions of wildebeest on their annual spring migration across that great African savannahs, model an unwavering determination to maintain their growing edge whenever the conditions are ripe to start anew, regardless of external circumstances.
Using the Past to Chart a New Path Forward
Look at the photograph I took of a pine tree overlooking a bay in Mendocino, CA. Notice how the branches have been shaped the the winds blowing in off the ocean. This pine tree has not conformed to some ideal pine shape. It has faced the wind, bent to its incessant force, and the result is a captivating beauty that reflects the pine’s resilience and uniqueness.
Can we do the same? Rather than forever mourn what could have, or should have been? Instead of lamenting the unfairness and injustice of what happened that was not supposed to, can we learn to assimilate what happened by taking it in, fully absorbing it, reshape it, and learn to express ourselves in a larger, richer, and more all-encompassing manner that brings forward our most authentic self? Author James Hollis describes how important it is to learn from nature’s way of growing, which always involves the new emerging from and through the residue of the past. He says nature is “always seeking the next stage in service to its purposes,” (Hollis, J., 2020, pp. 3).
That perspective is wise. Growing doesn’t mean fighting against the past. Rather, growth depends upon the past to move forward. The past isn’t the determiner of the future. The past is the fodder or the fuel needed to guide us toward the future. The famous German poet Rainer Maria Rilke takes this idea even further. In the eighth of his Letters to a Young Poet he suggests that the pain of the past is the outer shell of a mysterious inner growth that we must learn to respect and honor. He says:
“So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you, larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”
In charting a new path forward, are you prepared to learn from Nature, Hollis, and Rilke? I am here to help you discover that path. I am ready when you are.