“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.” –Stephen King
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about living in the present moment. I guess I’ve been thinking about it so much because I find myself speaking about how my past has caused me to be a certain way in the present.
I catch myself accrediting past hurts or experiences to why I think or act the way I do now. It’s something everybody does, and certainly something I’ve done many times over, but I’ve realized how it’s only hindered my growth as a person and my overall experience of life.
As much as we get past old wounds and people who have hurt us, we somehow still hold on to those cuts, not as bleeding heartbreaks, but like an object that we choose to keep caged, so we can keep going back to look at it, examine it, have possession over it, so we know it will always be ours.
We feel that we need it inside of us to refer back to, so that we don’t make the same mistakes we once did, or so that we don’t go through something we would never want to experience again. It’s romanticizing the act of hitting the replay button so we can watch over and over again not only the aches of a certain time in our lives, but our resilience in those times.
I think the only way to fully get over something or someone so that it no longer represents a bump in your own road of evolvement, is to open the cage door and set it free.
Even old pains have their unique beauty, the kind of allure and loveliness that we don’t want to see take flight from our lives. But to keep using them as reasons to not fully live your life in the total and complete bliss that it should be, only puts yourself in a cage that only you have the key to.
The only way to move forward is to leave the past behind; not locked in a cage, but set free, so that you too, are free.
