Last month while I was in Austin with my friend Bonnie, we (Bonnie) took a wrong turn one day and ended up driving through a local neighborhood. Well, Austin is weird, so someone had fastened a large toy dinosaur to a dead tree in front of their house. Bonnie thought it was so cool. She said, “When I move to Nashville, I want a dinosaur in my yard.” After that, we kept seeing dinosaurs wherever we went–in a modern furniture store, on a t-shirt. You know how it works when you get focused on something–it’s everywhere. But just like that, dinosaurs became a kind of mascot–for having a new life, for having something to look forward to.
At least that’s how I took it.
The night after we got back to Fort Smith, I finished the blog about five in the morning. Earlier that evening I’d been in Fayetteville, stopped at Walmart, gathered supplies. I couldn’t find a single large dinosaur, so I settled on a troupe–or is it a flock?–of small dinosaurs. Still under the cover of night, racing to beat the sunrise, I drove to Bonnie’s house, circled the block to see if there were any lights on inside, and then parked my car across the street and headed for a tree in her front yard, toy dinosaurs and a pack of push-pins in my hands. Fifteen minutes later, five different types of dinosaurs were lined up neatly on a slanted tree trunk, looking as if they were slowly marching their way to the top of the tree–or maybe to extinction.
I’ve been concerned that a horny squirrel might mistake the t-rex for a lover or that a thunderstorm would come along and–once again–wipe all the dinosaurs off the face of the planet, but each of them has held strong. Tonight I went to Bonnie’s to hang out with her family on their front porch, and all five of those guys (or gals–I didn’t check) were right where I left them.
Bonnie thinks they’re great, by the way.
This evening I’ve been thinking about all the things that irritate me, all the things that make me mad. It’s not that I’ve been obsessing about them, but you know how it goes–you can’t really help it, especially when you’re tired. So I’ve been remembering that rude lady I talked to at the insurance company yesterday, kind of having imaginary conversations where I stick up for myself, tell her to go jump off a bridge, or say she sounds just like a frustrated lesbian. (Sometimes I do this sort of daydreaming with people I deliberately don’t talk to anymore, people who didn’t respect my boundaries. My therapist says it happens because I never told those people what assholes I thought they were. She also says it’s too late to tell them now. That ship has sailed. Oh well.)
Caroline Myss says this is one of the ways we keep the past alive. We think about it and think about it. We build resentments. She says every day we wake up with a hundred energetic dollars, and most of us are near broke before we get out of bed because we’re worried about something that happened at work yesterday or angry about something a relative said six months ago. Before you know it, you don’t have any money left for spending right here, right now. This, I think, is the lesson Jesus was teaching when a disciple said he’d “be right there” but needed to bury his father first. “Let the dead bury the dead,” Jesus said. In other words, leave the past where it belongs–in the past.
Sometimes you have to go back before you can go forward.
I guess it’s ironic Bonnie and I chose the dinosaur as a mascot for the future–you know–because dinosaurs clearly don’t have one. Honestly, dinosaurs associate much better with the past (they’ve been dead a long time), and I think it’s interesting how hard our culture works at keeping them alive. We buy plastic toys of them, put them in a friend’s tree, make big productions about them. Of course, this is innocent enough. But I know I often do the same thing with my actual past–make a big production out of it. I think, “If I ever talk to that person again, I’m gonna really let ’em have it.” I tell my friends, “Can you believe that bitch?” But the truth is–like the dinosaurs–the past is over, even though I often refuse to let it go. Instead, I spend my precious energy trying to bring the dead back to life.
I had someone tell me once that therapy was concerned mostly with a person’s past. They may not have meant it like this, but I got the impression they thought therapy could be used as a way to stay stuck back there, maybe blame someone else for all your problems. (My friend Ray calls people that do this “whiners.”) Thankfully, that hasn’t been my experience with therapy. I remember that first day when my therapist asked me why I was there. I said, “Well, I’m dating a guy and it’s a mess. We met last year and moved in together a few months later.”
“That was a very lesbian thing to do,” she said.
And then for nearly an hour I marched out all the stuff I thought I’d never talk about–sort of a preview of coming attractions–basically job security for her–all the parts of my past that I’d swept under the rug for over thirty years. Since then, I guess you could say that we’ve been concerned with the past. But the point has never been to bring it back to life–because it’s never really been dead. The point has been to understand it, to have compassion for the guy who lived it, and in so doing–finally let it go the way of the dinosaurs.
In this sense, the dinosaur is the perfect mascot for the future because all too often it’s the past that holds us backs and weighs us down. What I mean is that sometimes you have to go back before you can go forward. So whether it’s something that happened yesterday or something that happened thirty years ago, you deal with it and you put it in perspective. And then–like a flock of small dinosaurs–you take the pieces of your past, put them neatly in a row, and march them toward extinction, leaving yourself free to have a new life, to have something to look forward to–right here, right now.
Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)
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Along the way you’ll find yourself, and that’s the main thing, the only thing there really is to find.
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