You partake in life at the same time as you observe it. It is like you are taking your own picture. You may be a major player on the field, and yet you are in a booth taking a picture of yourself on the playing field. You record every action and often do replays, and, in retrospect, you ponder all the moves you made.
Although you may forget a lot, you recorded everything and stored it somewhere. In a sense, you are a hoarder of experience on Earth.
You are a tourist who travels to a distant land, and you want to bring back home with you every memory of scenery and architecture, art, food, and the people. You want to bring everyone and everything back with you. You want to bring home every scent and shade of color. You stick the memories somewhere within you. You have your camera and recorder going all the time. You don’t want to let them go.
What you really want is to hold everything in place. You want to stop time. You want to make the impermanent permanent. You want to stockpile the past and be able to sort through it, organize it, learn something from it, keep it with you always. Meanwhile, streams of new experience pour in, and the camera clicks and the recorder records and plays.
What you forget is that life on Earth is all a passing moment that, like the tide, like the dawn, like the seasons, cannot be held back. You forget that you are to let go of the past. You can’t keep it anyway, and yet you continue to add more to all the backload you have stuffed somewhere in your mind. Your dear mind gets crowded. You store more and more. You go through some of the past deliberately, and some of it imposes itself on you. The past is water under the bridge. The past is yesterday’s newspaper. You really can’t keep scrapbooks of every experience. Keeping the past is not a hobby you can keep up with. What you end up with is clutter.
Just as in life, you cannot keep all past possessions in a storage shed. There is no room for them. Besides, you have to let go of them. What is the point of keeping them all anyway? Sooner or later, past accumulation of all accountings and memories has to recede and make space for right now.
Travel light, beloveds. Just take a little knapsack with you, or, okay, a little backpack. Do not drag a trainload along with you. Life on Earth itself is but a brief moment.
You can’t really pack love, and yet love will go with you wherever your foot falls. Take wide steps across the land of life. You are where you are now. Do not even gather rosebuds. Let them fall where they may.
You are not meant to be a collector of life. Do not keep the war mementos and the baby booties. Life moves on, and so must you.
Every day you are a new person. You do not want to be encumbered with the past. You do not want to be encumbered.
Be light of foot like Mercury.
Let go of memories and possessions and conclusions and all that holds you back. Do not stockpile the past. You are a God-created being right now and you are made for this glimpse of Eternity that is called right now. Otherwise, you burden yourself. Take what fits into your heart, beloveds. Take Me, take you, take Us.