I.42 — Loosening the Past

Of all the grips, the one on the past is the strangest, because there is nothing left to hold on to. The event is finished. It cannot be edited, argued with, or undone by any amount of attention, and yet the hand keeps closing around it anyway, every day, as if closing tighter might eventually change what happened.

It will not. This is the purest grip there is, because it is entirely one-sided: the past does not grip back, does not respond, does not know it is being held. Only the person holding it is doing anything, and what they are doing is closing the same fist around the same fact, over and over, on a schedule that has nothing to do with the fact itself.

Look at it plainly, without a story about deserving to suffer for it and without a story about deserving to be let off. Neither story is required. What is required is seeing that the fact and the clench are two different things. The fact stays exactly as heavy as it is, and it is only the daily re-clenching that adds weight on top of it.

Carried openly, the fact does not disappear and does not stop mattering. It simply stops being re-injured on purpose, every morning, by a hand that mistook holding tightly for honoring what happened.