The past weekend offered me a pair of significant reunions, one with my high school class and the other with a brother whom I see less often than I would like.  Each event was designed to bring the past into focus.  Each event cast a fresh new light on today.

Joe and I share a father who died in 1959.  Fifty-five years later, we explored childhood memories of his complex influence on the people we have become in the decades since.  My high school class graduated in 1964. Fifty years later, we explored our shared adolescence and made an effort to build a bridge  between those experiences and the women we are today. 

In both cases, I am reflecting on the impacts of our diverse perceptions many years later.  While my brother and I each spent early years with the man called "Daddy," we remember different details and interpret them through different lenses.  While my classmates and I took the same classes, obeyed the same rules, and listened to the same advice, we have chosen different highlights to remember fondly and different frustrations to carry as emotional baggage for the long journey into adulthood. The collective experience of those two parallel reunions continues to simmer in my mind, with lessons gradually rising to the surface of my learning.

I realize now, in a new way, how incomplete and subjective my memories really are.  They feature isolated events from which I craft composite pictures resembling a tangled, multilevel puzzle.  Those pictures may not depict the reality I strive to re-create; they are viewed through the distorted lens of who-I-was-then.   When we compare notes, I find that my memories differ from those of others from the same place and time. Where I see myself clinging to troubling events from the past, I can sometimes begin to let them go.  

I remember my father as critical and disapproving with an explosive, unpredictable temper.  To this day, I easily tune into to signs of rejection and avoid issues that could trigger an emotional response.  I remember my high school as rigidly conservative and tightly bound by rules of conduct.  To this day, I am inclined to obey first and ask questions later.  The desire to please and the urge to conform converged early in my life and have affected my development over the years.

As I recently shared those memories with others, I gained a broader perspective.  I saw that my father and the more restrictive teachers reflected their own experience, doing their best with what they had been given.  I also saw my father's tender concern for his only daughter (the one who appeared after his parenting days were said to be done).  I remember and applaud those teachers who challenged our thinking, opened our minds, and pushed us to forge meaningful lives in the larger world.   Having re-examined some troubling memories that don't serve me well, I am ready to let them go.

In what ways do you allow the past to haunt you now? What would it take to question your assumptions, dig them out, and let them go?