Life flows, and that is why it is better not to try to hold on to it. Like water, life loses something when it is stored. Fresh life, like water, is on tap, so why store it? Why have stale when you can have fresh? Like water cupped in your hands, life also slips between your fingers, and you find your hands empty.
You have wanted your feet in two boats called the Past and Present. Sometimes, forgetting the Present, you choose the Past and Future. You think the boat of the past is secure, and the boat of the present may be dangerous — certainly it is unpredictable. You would rather have a hold of one boat, even if it is leaky, than to accept another boat wholeheartedly. Or you see the boat of the Future as more desirable than the one at hand.
The past is as unknown to you as the present. You don't really know more about the past than you did when it was present. It skimmed past you, and yet you are still trying to figure it out. You are trying to figure out your figuring out.
The past of itself is stagnant. You think it can be held in place. But all you can have of the past is your thoughts about it, and they go round and round.
So much of your present is based on the past and your thinking of it. You let the past become your basis for the present. The past is no basis at all. History repeats itself because you dwell on it. You try to capture it again, and so you do, again and again.
You are a kaleidoscope that you keep turning, yet it keeps showing the same configuration.
Caught up in the past, you are caught there. Catch up to the present. Drop off the past, and you will be a spinning dancer at the spinning center of the universe. You will indeed be on top of the world. You have been submerged in the world enough. Emerge instead.
What is living in the past but using the past as your precepts. What are past precepts but world thought? The whole world seems to be predicated on the past. But there is a presentness and a Presence. Presently, the past is not gone. That is the difficulty. You carry the past. The past is not the making of you. It never was.
You have been holding the reins of horses that are gone, yet you think the horses are still moving you forward. So you hold on to reins connected to nothing but themselves and to your thoughts of horses that gallop.
You may think that letting go is a hard thing to do, for it has been hard for you. Once you unfasten your fingers, it's easy. Once you decide there is no or little value in holding on, you can let go of your grasp that held nothing anyway.
If you hold on to your picture of the past, which, by and large, you do, you must think there is an advantage to you, or why would you hold on? Effort in trying to escape the past is still holding on to your picture of it.
Letting go of the past and the hold it has on you is like taking off unwieldy clothes, clothes that hamper your movement, clothes that bind. No matter how precious to you these clothes are, no matter how unfaded they are, they keep you from moving forward. Step out of them. You are meant to move forward into eternity. Eternity is right here right now.
Past, let My children go!