Our Permanent Record

In my last posting I made a glib remark about ‘The game of life.’ Even as I wrote it, I thought, ‘that’s not right,’ and so I made a parenthetical correction. But there are some truths about games or athletic contests or our academic record, or driving record, credit ratings, etc., that don’t easily go away. They become part of our life story, our permanent record.

There is a permanent record; it lives on in the memories of all the people we have interacted with in a significant way. It may even be on others’ computer files or on photographs taken on inauspicious occasions. It may be etched on our countenance. It lives on in our own perception of ourselves, coloring and flavoring who we become, what we expect to be able to accomplish and how we live our lives. Our future is, in large part, in our past.

Unfortunately, some people have so much waste in their past that it almost washes away their future. Many have found that if one day they decide they no longer want to be the person they have become, or live the life they are living, it is no easy task to stop all that accumulated momentum.

But it is possible to transform a rended past into a mended future. I used to say to my children that ‘It is better to prepare and prevent than to repair and repent.’ I still believe that, but still it is good to repair and repent. Indeed it is possible, in religious vernacular, to be ‘born again.’ ‘Repentance,’ though a religious term, originally meant to channel, to turn from something and to turn to something else. It is still a viable principle.

Thankfully, redemption is possible but it cannot be accomplished alone, by one’s own willpower alone. Until a person admits that he/she is powerless to make the permanent transformation on his own power, and then submits to and accepts the help that can be had, it will stay on the permanent record.