Someone's Child

===Originally published July 24, 2011===

We are all someone's child, all of us are.

One very, very good thing to remember is this: time moves forward for our parents just as it does for us. They were not the same people then as they are now, time's flow of events will have changed and grown them as well.

A great deal of unhappiness in our world begins from not recognizing this simple fact of life. Many, far to many, will look back on their childhood and judge the actions of their parents as if their parents were then the same people they are at the time the judgment is made. They will hold the younger parent responsible to the same level of understanding that is seen in the elder parent, a retroactive judgment. Such retroactive judgments are terribly unfair, both to the parent being judged and to ourselves, for when we form negative opinions, when we assign fault and blame as a result of such retroactive judgments many will be inaccurate, and our assumptions of motive (they just didn't care; I must be bad; I did something wrong but they won't tell me what; they loved so-and-so more than I; they sold me out; I was expendable) will likely be just as inaccurate.

We all have events in our past that did us hurt and harm, some unsavory event we would never want to repeat. Those events are history, fixed, they cannot be changed only grown beyond in understanding. All such events cast a shadow across a life, they do. Those shadows may be short, merely a bit of a dimming to our joy, or they may be long and dark creating such pain in our life as to rob us of joy for a time, but still: they are but the shadow of an event gone by, fixed and finite. They will come to an end unless something happens to extend them, to give them new power in the present as their power from the past fades to the light of new events arriving. Such shadows can only endure beyond their original lifespan if in some manner we help them to survive.

As I look out on the world, as I look in on myself, the most common way we help those shadows survive is in those times when a retroactive judgment causes us to assign a motive that is not accurate, that is not true, for those errors do not remain in the past, no, they come forward through the years with us. Every time such an error influences an event in the present the error creates a new shadow to add to the first, extending the shadow of that first unsavory event into times and places and peoples that had absolutely nothing to do with the event that created the shadow in the first place.

Perhaps the most damning form of this error is when we pass a retroactive judgment on ourselves, and allow the errors of motive to apply not to another (where we can separate ourselves from the error in some manner: a falling out, a divorce, a breaking of all ties) but to our younger self. Those, those are the most dangerous errors there are, for you can never be free of yourself. The error applied to another will only impact the parts of life where the other is found, but such errors applied to ourselves will impact any and every facet of our lives for after all, we are in EVERY moment of our own life. Those are the errors that can do more than damage a life, those are the errors that can destroy a life.

Neither they nor we are the same person now as was then, beware the damage retroactive judgment can do to your life, to the lives of those around you. Beware of allowing such errors to extend the shadows. I weep to think of how much misery is caused in such a manner.