The Past Is Just a Story We Tell
As I get older, I’m realizing something quietly profound: the past isn’t a fixed place we can all point to—it’s a story we tell, shaped by the lens of who we’ve become.
I grew up in a large family, the kind that spills across generations and dinner tables. Over time, our stories—about childhood, holidays, triumphs, heartbreaks—have started to sound less like shared memories and more like a collection of overlapping myths. Each of us tells a version that feels true. Yet when we line them up side by side, the edges don’t quite match.
At first, that used to bother me. And, quite honestly, it still does at times.
There’s something inside me that wants the stories to line up—to make sense, to connect the dots cleanly. That longing for alignment is still there, and I think it’s what continues to spark my curiosity. Why do we remember the same moment so differently? What does that say about both who we were and who we’ve each become?
Over time, I’ve come to see that memory doesn’t live in the facts. It lives in the feeling. Each of us carries an imprint of what those moments meant—what we needed to see, what we were ready to hold, what we had the capacity to love or forgive at the time.
As our family grows—children, grandchildren, in-laws, and the ever-widening branches—it becomes clearer that no one version of the past can possibly contain all the truth. There are simply too many hearts, too many perspectives, too many meanings.
So how do we decide who’s right or wrong?
Maybe we don’t. Maybe the truer answer is that we all are—each in our own way.
Memory, like time, is fluid. It bends around emotion, reshapes itself with both ignorance and wisdom, and reveals different truths as we evolve. The story you tell at sixty will never be the one you told at twenty—and that’s okay. The past is alive inside us, constantly retelling itself as we change.
Maybe that’s the gift of aging—not to perfect the story, but to soften it. To listen to each other’s versions with curiosity instead of defense. To allow that what felt like chaos to one might have felt like safety to another. That what one remembers as laughter, another might recall as longing.
In the end, the past isn’t about proving who’s right.
It’s about honoring that we all remember through the lens of love, loss, and the lives we’ve lived since.
When the Story Meets the Present
Recently, I butted up against this truth in my own life. I found myself in a moment that felt so far from how I remembered it that I couldn’t even recognize the story being told back to me. I was incredulous—almost stunned. I backed away, but if I’m honest, I did it with a heart full of quiet arrogance that likely reflected that, certain that my version was the right one.
Then came the waves—doubt, grief, sadness, anger at myself, anger at others. None of which helped. Spinning in my own self judgment only deepened the ache. In sitting in that ache a deeper longing to understand both the situation and what was my responsibility and what wasn’t.
So I did what I’ve learned to do when I lose my footing: I returned to my practices, writing, meditation and, of course, “Remember to Breathe”. Because, if I’ve learned anything from 15 years of studying tantra I’ve learned that. Everything begins and ends with the breath. And, I reached out to people who could both listen and were willing to tell me the truth even when it’s hard to hear. Perhaps, especially when it’s the hardest.
What struck me most was a very simple question from a dear friend and teacher,
Why was being right—or even needing to respond—so important to me about something that happened so long ago?
That question landed like a mirror I didn’t want to look into. But it was exactly the one I needed. It forced me to pause and sit with the truth that what I was defending wasn’t the memory itself—it was my identity, the part of me that had a deep longing to be seen and understood. And, in that awareness of myself I was able to feel compassion for the other person as well. All of us long to be seen and understood. It’s one of the parts of being human that is both amazing and so incredibly hard.
The mirror was hard, and honestly, it sent me on a deeper and very important quest for the truth within myself.
That same dear friend reminded me of another truth I’d long known but needed to remember: the only behavior I can change is my own. It begins with acknowledging the pain that was felt, admitting that you didn’t deserve harshness, and an inquiry into how to repair the damage.
So in the quiet of the Catskill mountains, sitting alone under an open sky, I spoke out loud—not only to the people in my family of origin, but also to my friends, to the mountains themselves, to the creatures that call that place home, to God, and ultimately to myself. I called to the land to hear me, to hold what I could no longer carry in silence.
“I’m sorry you felt that way.
You didn’t deserve to be treated that way.
What can I do to repair our relationship?”
And in the stillness of the land, with the sounds of birds carrying across the hills, I heard a whisper rise up from somewhere deep within—gentle, timeless, and true:
Return to love.
The Teaching Beneath the Story
That whisper reminded me of one of my favorite poems,
“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.
The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer.
The people they don’t recognise inside themselves anymore.
The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into.
We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost.
But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be.
It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way.
Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame.
Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.”― Heidi Priebe
The Thread That Remains
As we we all move toward the later chapters of our life, it is a certainty that the coming years will bring more loss and grief, more joy and pleasure, more tragedy and uncertainty. Our memories and our stories will continue to shift and reshape themselves, because that is what living does—it keeps rewriting us.
What stays constant is that love weaves through all of it.
Through the good times and the bad, the reminiscing and forgetting, the hugs, the screaming at each other, the tears, the laughter, fractured relationships, silence and, through death itself. Love is the current beneath the noise, the force that binds the fragments of our stories into something whole.And maybe, in generations to come, those mixed memories will only be whispered in the wind—free from the details, just the essence will remain—ruffling the hair of another young woman or man sitting in that same spot in the Catskill Mountains, struggling with their own journey.
And, perhaps if they listen closely, maybe they’ll hear the same quiet response. The truth that wove through me and whispered back to me…
Through pain, tears, anger, joy, and grief and uncertainty — return to the most powerful energy of all…
Love