Look forward, angel

We can—and should—learn from the past. We can—and should—examine our lives. (The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates famously said.)

But I wonder. I wonder about all this re-living the past, this ruminating (in the cud-chewing sense) and this continued obsession (both of writers and apparently of readers) with memoir. I belong to a Facebook group, Binders of Creative Nonfiction, and it seems to me that 90 percent of what the women—thoughtful, generous, lovely souls as far as I can tell–are posting about, asking questions about, ”humble bragging” about is memoir. Creative nonfiction—or as I prefer to call this genre I have been working in for my entire writing life—narrative nonfiction, is so much more. It is (or can be about) going out into the world and discovering the lives others live and how and why they live them, the communities they are part of, especially communities hidden from view. We learn more about ourselves that way, too, but we get to look both outward and inward.

I think the reason I am concerned at this moment is that I feel the overwhelming need for us to look forward, not back, to imagine futures, not dwell in the past.

It’s about politics, of course. It’s about 2020 and moving beyond the evil and idiocy of the current government. It’s about not chewing over (and, in some odd way, relishing the taste in our mouths) of this terrible, terrible time. It’s about believing in goodness, in actively, forwardly joining together to make that happen.

But it is also (in the spirit of memoir I just finished criticizing and yet right here am practicing!), about my own life. About what has happened, just recently, that has jolted me, that made me want to chew the cud and re-live what was and is no more, that made me, in my darker moments (that would be 3 am) replay, rewind, replay, rewind and (in my truly dark moments) construct elaborate revenge scenarios.

What I should be doing, what I am now pledging to do, is to stop expending energy on the past I can’t change and use it all—and if you know me, you know I have a lot of it—on the good I can do now.