“Throwing bombs over my shoulder”
It was a little line that caught my attention. It slipped past very quickly but it made me stop and think; the words rattling around long after the words had finished making a sound.
I’ve known people who have left organisations and on their way ‘out’ have thrown a bomb over their shoulder. It’s not a courteous thing to do and it leaves a mess for the next person and those who are trying to settle them in.
But that is not what this person was referring to. They were talking about the process where they tried to obliterate their past and …I get that. I do. To chuck a bomb over your shoulder and eliminate what has gone before. There are things in all of our lives that we wish had never occurred. Errors of judgement, the unexpected illness or death, the unravelling of a relationship. Sometimes it’s a combo of all of the above.
And while the past is the past, it can never be completely extinguished. We are all products of our past no matter how shady or scarred or icky. The trick I think is to learn from what has gone before and to use that as jet propulsion fuel for the future. To hopefully not make the same mistakes again. To be shinier, wiser, smarter, gentler and maybe even smile more. To reach out a hand to those who have fallen in the same pothole that we fell into. To be able to say … ‘This is what I found helped me when the wheels fell off.’
The past is the past, is the past and far from demolishing it we can actually learn from it, put our anger and bombs away and look forward to the future.