It’ll be all right
A good friend of mine introduced me to a poem by David Ray called “Thanks, Robert Frost.” I share it with you because so many clients of mine (and friends, too—and myself!) often have regrets about the past. We get angry at our past selves, frustrated that we didn’t do this, didn’t accomplish that, didn’t say or think or do the right thing.
The Buddha said that to practice compassion, one must first be compassionate toward one’s self. A major part of being compassionate toward yourself is forgiving yourself for the mistakes, shortcomings, and failures that clutter your past. I don’t think it’s right to call it “letting go of the past,” because the past is always with us, always shaping us. I think instead that it’s making sense of the past, and making peace with the past. It sounds funny to use the future tense when talking about the past, but I’ll do it anyway: the past will be all right. It’ll be all right. Here’s the poem:
Thanks, Robert Frost
by David Ray
Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
… Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.
