It is from our memories that we create a life of dissatisfaction, tension and misery.
Our memories of pleasure fill our present moment with craving and clinging to past joy. We face the moment with expectations and comparisons created by pleasures that have long since passed, the moment never lives up to the fantasies to which we cling.
Our memories of pain creates apprehension and forecasts of doom never allowing what is to be, we face the moment untrustingly, warily and full of aversion. We accept this misery regardless of whether it is real or just remembered.
The lens of our past from which we view the present and falsely predict the future is the mechanism of our ignorance.
The past is sealed, frozen forever, yet we thrust it onto the present moment with uncompromising comparison, destroying any hope, spontaneity and growth into the darkness of the sealed tomb of our past experience.
We never give the present moment a chance to be experienced for what it is, we defined its reality long ago.
Any new experience instantly triggers a cascade of memories and the freshness of each moment is suffocated under the rubble of our past, as we empty a closet full of skeletons into each moment.
From memories long-term relationships become stagnant, defined, classified, full of resentment and stale. We cease learning because we tell ourselves we know and we understand.
We foolishly celebrate our memories as who we are and define life with our traumas, not realizing that in these celebrations and definitions we have given away any chance of curiosity, wonder, hope, intelligence, spontaneity, growth and true happiness. In our attachment to our memories we have lost the art of living.
Each moment is impermanent, arising and passing. Feel it, experience it and let it pass. Be Happy.