Past, What a Trickster

   There comes a time, in just a "man's" life as the cliche statement says, but in everyone's life when they own up to one true and necessarily independently answered question: how will you live your life?  In what way, with what perspective, with what guiding you, with what motivation you?  Such a question has been one I have asked myself from a young age.  Once that decision is made and is made definitively, few things can hold such a motivated person from his prize, that prize which is hidden in the answer to said question: the prize to be whole and complete, to be content with yourself.  This is something that every single person in this universe strives for.  They want to be content, they want to be able to say "I am who I want to be."
   However, the sad fact is that few in any are truly at this point in any stage of their life, save perhaps childhood.  Why is that?  I propose one major obstacle: the past.  Oh, the past! What a trickster he is.  For even when all things may be coming forth with all promise of blessing and with all promise of success and with all promise of that prize of contentment, he comes up again ever so slightly to poke in your face those things which you desire to leave behind, those mistakes that you wish to forget, and the experiences you wish you hadn't gone through.  Why must we remember our pasts?  Why must we go through such torture time and time again?  Why must we remember the things that we had but have lost?  That question haunts each and every one of us at some stage in our very short lives upon this earth.  Will the answer be ours?  We may never know.  And that is an answer in and of itself.

Oh Past! what a trickster is he!
He who ruins all the beauty of lives flowers
Oh Past! why refuse to leave me?
For at the sight of you my esteem cowers