Old Beginnings

"I'm a soldier, Adriana. You gotta remember that."
Christopher Moltisanti

It was that quote from The Sopranos that inspired me in many ways. It, among other things, is the primary muse for this installment of my anonymous, unread Internet opus.

A quick background: Christopher and Adriana are two twenty-somethings who are engaged to be married. Christopher is a made man in the Soprano family - one of Tony's (the boss) cousins. Adriana is his naively dumb but loveable girlfriend who loves him despite his frequent beatings and his prolific drug use. She desperately wants the two of them to leave New Jersey and their life in "this thing" behind, and while he has entertained the idea for her benefit, he's never really thought seriously about walking away from his entire life. Which begs the question: can you ever walk away from your entire life?

There are a slew of aphorisms and quotes that would make it seem that you can walk away and start afresh somewhere else: Every day is a new beginning. It's never too late to start over. Et cetera.

But IS it ever too late to start over? I've written, I believe, before about how you can make all the changes in your life you want, but at the end of the day, you're still yourself - stuck with your past, your mistakes, your triumphs and failures. These will never change. And they will forever influence the choices we make. So that to me says that you can never really start over. You can never have a clean slate.

Sure, you can make changes. You can change careers mid-life. You can finally get that divorce. You can move to a new city where nobody knows you. But are you back at the beginning? You're not - you're a 50 year old intern; you're 45 and single, not 25 and single; and you still know you. You may be at a figurative beginning, but it often leaves you either very far behind or very worried that whatever you've tried to get over in your past will eventually come back to haunt you.

This is one reason I have so much admiration for recovering alcoholics or drug addicts: they have actually managed, in some form, to cast off their past and look forward to a different - not new, but different - life. I have yet to win the war against my temptations, and part of me feels like, what's the point? Just because I stop doing XYZ doesn't mean I never did it - I'm still damaged goods, imperfect, a danger to myself.

So I guess what this comes back to is the universal theme in my life - how we deal with our past. I can't seem to get over mine; it lives with me every day. Some days I'm able to forget about it, when I'm busy, or feeling unnaturally content, but some days it comes back with a vengeance, like a roaring tornado set on destroying everything in its path. You can rebuild a town, but that won't stop the tornadoes from coming. I have allowed myself to fall victim to my past, which bolsters the idea I've built up around myself that I can never start over. Yes, in a way, I realize this is a self-fulfilling prophecy and that I'm only setting myself up for misery by thinking this way, but there IS a grain of truth to it.

I hope that one day I'm able to allow myself to believe that I can start over and leave the past and all its troubles and worries behind me, but it never seems to work out. I'll say, This is the last time, this is it, really, this time, and then it's over. And a few days later I'll be back in the exact same spot, holding back the tears of disappointment. I have yet to learn the tools for moving on.

Which makes for a rather interesting existence. A major part of life is learning to let go and move on, because, to be cheesey, if you're not living in the present, you're doing no favors to anybody. What's past is past, you can't change it, so get over it...right. So I live every day trying desperately to move on from things that plague me, I spend my time daydreaming about how in the future, "one day," everything will be different. I spend very little time in the present. And I don't think that's a good way to live.

It's sad, really, because I do want the most out of life, and I do want to learn to let go and move on without the heavy burden of age-old baggage. So every day I try to drop one tiny piece from all those suitcases being dragged around in my mind, try to forget one old hurt and regret. It's slow moving, but I think it's working.

In the end I don't think it's about starting over when life takes an unexpected turn, but more about the big picture of where each misstep and action puts you next. My uncle once said to me, "Remember, every decision you make is right if it's yours." I had to think about that a while, because initially, I completely disagreed with it. But now I understand. You have to own yourself, you have to recognize that everything is a brick in the journey - the journey that can end in eternal bliss.

But until I've mastered the art of forgetting, I try to listen to those former alcoholics: one day at a time.