Blasted by the past

It's still happening. Facebook. Those names that haunt. The past haunts us.

Am I a coward for not going there? I don't think so. I like the idea of looking back and smiling. But if I need a smile, I can find one here, in the present.

Yeah, there were great things. But life has only gotten better, bigger, broader since then. I've discovered so much - and incorporated those discoveries into my life. So I can look back and smile, knowingly.

But go there? The question is: go where?? There's nothing there. Stephen King drew us an eerie picture of the past in "The Langoliers": it's a grey, inert place lifelessly waiting for the sharp-toothed pac-men to come and eat it up. And if you're there when they come, they'll eat you, too.

Traditionally spirits are the rope that hangs us from our painful memories and exorcism is the only path to freedom. But can ghosts be helpful? Can talking to ghosts of high schools past be the exorcism we need to lay that putrid past to rest and move into the future? Or are the ghosts just teasing us, manipulating us into believing that holding on is the only way to keep from getting lost?

I say that we have control and the ghosts only have the power we give them. We just have to be aware of the tension existing between them and us, between the past and the present, and try to keep a balance. That can be hard to do, though, as we're being blasted by the past during our cutting-edge tour of the World Wide Web.