Rewriting Your History

When I see a prompt like this I think of the words of Sunscreen, the Baz Luhrman Number 1 where the narrator says, ‘Your choices are half chance, so are everyone else’s.’ I think that speaks to the main issue with keeping a promise to yourself, namely that it pretty much always depends on circumstances. As with ideas such as fate we are very adept as human beings of retrospectively seeing both patterns and paths that led us through particular times.

Promises we make to ourselves tend to be forgotten if they don’t happen and seen as an example of our strength and determination if they do. We make many promises to ourselves, most of which are unfulfilled and erased from memory. We often congratulate ourselves on plucking the low hanging fruit which reinforces the idea of our ability to bend events to our will. When something we promise ourselves requires us to simply act in a way that is natural, that’s not keeping a promise, that’s merely following a preset path that we couldn’t move away from if we tried.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as being at the mercy of upbringing, events, financial positions or pure luck, good or bad, but we are. Most of us stumble through life doing our best and that should be enough. To retrofit our decisions as keeping a promise to ourselves is, at best, a failure to acknowledge reality and, at worst, a deliberate falsehood. We are tiny insignificant creatures in the greater scheme of things, an interesting turn of phrase for me as I don’t believe in a greater scheme. Our success or failure is simply that, not some great crusade that we have embarked on and either completed or not. Remember that when you next reflect on your ability to keep your promises. Let me finish as I started with a song lyric. ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans’, as Allen Sanders said in 1957. It was popularised by John Lennon in Beautiful Boy, one of his last songs in 1980. It is still true all these years later.