Beloveds, will you let the past go once and for all? All that was said and done, and all that was not said and not done are chains around your ankles. You cannot undo, and you cannot do over. You cannot rewrite one word of what was written in the past. You cannot go back to that flimsy moment of non-existent time and make corrections. You cannot put in a carat mark and insert a phrase. You cannot change the past because it is no longer. It never was really. It was some fiction you lived in for a while.

So bow to the past. Wave goodbye to it. Bless it, for it made its contribution. Every wrong committed or good omitted is mere writing on the margin of a page of your life, or a page torn or a page skipped. Let go of the merits and demerits you assign to yourself. You were inexperienced, and you are wiser now. Then be wiser. Know better than to dredge up the past and to fantasize you relive it.

Say so long to it and your feelings about it. Release the past from the present. Let it go. All the past was something you imagined. It doesn’t exist now. It truly didn’t exist then. Oh, yes, this and that can be documented, but it has since all been caught by the wind and swept away, and yet you would still inhabit the past. You think about it as if it were the boat you sail on now.

Now you are in fresh waters. Your reflection in the waters is different now from what it used to be. All the past is just a thought. Truly a thought is all it ever was. You who forget so many things in daily life, can you not forgo the past? It is an old canoe. It was good while it lasted, or it was bad while it lasted, but the past doesn’t have to last now.

You have let go of your baby clothes. You have let go of your prom dress and your sport trophies. What closet of your mind must they exist in now?

You were able to let go of that streamlined car you once drove. You don’t know where it is now, or if it still exists anywhere. And yet you store it in the garage of your mind. It takes up too much room. It gets in your way.

Thoughts of the past make you sad and wistful and angry and forlorn and nostalgic. You are nostalgic now for the past that you couldn’t get away from fast enough at the time. And now you have encased the past in glass, made some kind of museum of it. When did you decide to be a taxidermist of the past?

Put your barrage of thoughts of the past onto a raft. Put a white flag on it, and let the raft float away from the bulrushes of your mind. The raft served you once. It served you twice. But it no longer serves you.

Attached to the past, you serve yourself stale food You yearn for the past, and you despair of it. You say it is your youth. You say it was precious to you. Let yourself be precious to you. Let the Human Being you are now be precious to you. Lost in the past, you abandon yourself.

You are your own child to take care of now. No matter your age, this is your youth now. Roads you have traveled and bridges you have passed have been supplanted with other roads and bridges before you. You cannot walk forward and backward at the same time.

Let go of your old knapsack and sit down to a picnic basket now.