If you look closely at the water it will move for you. It is an optical illusion, of course and. How much of our life is? How much of what we think is so is not so? If we say something about anything, anyone, and what we have said says more about us than it says about who we were talking about. It says more about how we see them than about who they are.
And we make associations with the things we see–this image, for instance–that no one else will make. The impact the image–and our life–has on us is personal. We respond to our life, the people, the experiences in our life, as we alone would respond.
Knowing who we are means observing ourselves in action, reflecting on what we see, making inquiries about where our responses originate–what is it about us and our background that makes it easy for us to see, feel, think the way we do?
We do not live isolated from everything that has occurred to us in our life. Everything has had some degree of impact on us psychologically, emotionally, physically, and we remember things long forgotten which stir to life when “reminded” by something similar in our present experience. We do not out grow, or out live, the things we have experienced which influence our responses to things that happen in our present experience.
How do we separate ourselves from what has happened to us? We can sit with what is currently happening that might stir old memories to life, and make inquiries, examining, inspecting, investigating what might be going on inside, but shutting ourselves off entirely from the impacts of the past may be beyond our best efforts. It may just be that we make our peace with having been impacted, and make room for the old emotions to be welcome in our present life.
Rumi’s poem “The Guest House” comes to mind as a helpful way of dealing with our past, and being a softer place for our present experiences to land.
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 