What Is the Past?

God boxes for resentments! Stoics on wasting time! Format changes! Check-In reminder! Billy Collins. New tunes.

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Just to check in:

We’ moved this week, not far, and only into a temporary spot until the summer, and then we’re off again someplace else, perhaps further or nowhere, but we’ll see. I’m the type of person who enjoys moving because I like lifting heavy things and love to purge shit. I’ve become pretty adept at letting objects go and have what I think is the most foolproof system for disposal. If I didn’t remember it existed, it gets pitched. There are some exemptions—old photographs, some sentimental items—but I don’t waste too much time trying to figure out if there are things I need to hang on to. (I admit I have a tough time getting rid of our kids’ toys—even the broken ones. I thought my oldest would love dinosaurs and collect dinosaur toys forever, but now it’s like the last three years of his life have never happened.)

However, one item I had to look at more closely was my old God Box, which was shoved way in the back of a container from the last time we moved, which would be around 2020. For those who don’t know what a God Box is, it’s a spiritual tool I picked up early on in Al-Anon, where you write down the most pressing problems in your life that are causing inner turmoil and then place them inside the box. The practice of writing it down, and letting it go, allows the mind to think more clearly and peacefully, some real 12-step Jedi shit. I augmented the practice to use it mainly as a Resentment Box where I’d place the names of people who’d done a number on me, spiritually speaking. The box is nothing special, just an old cardboard one that came with a giant order of note cards I’d ordered a few years back. It had more than a dozen names, but most of what bothered me so much about these people had, in fact, vanished. A few names that gave me some grouchy feelings were a good reminder that I need to be less hyper-sensitive about what others think about me.

One in particular brought up some guilt because it was the name of a person I used to work with who, to put it mildly, actively and publicly disliked me to an unnerving degree. I’d never considered putting him in the box because I didn’t really think I needed to let shit go—he was the one with the problem. But then he died suddenly and unexpectedly, and I threw his name in there to extinguish anything that came up for me. I wrote an essay about it the next day—wayyy too soon, obviously—but I couldn’t find another way to process it productively. I haven’t thought about the guy much since then, which I take as a sign that we’re both resting peacefully.

When I tracked down the essay and read it over, I also found an old check-in from readers when I asked them to submit things to their own God Box, and then I asked Edith to illustrate the results:

TSB Illustrated Reader Resentments Circa 2020 by Edith Zimmerman

After a few days of dredging up old memories, I spent extra time this week journaling and reading to remind myself about the uselessness of my current resentments. As I finished up, our four-year-old was nearby dicking around with his toys and I decided I’d read off to him what I wrote: “Stay present, my beautiful boy. There is nothing good in the past.” He looked up at me and, with big-eyed, four-year-old earnestness, asked: “What is the past?” I told him it doesn’t matter and I let him get back to happily fighting the Hulk against three overmatched Trolls dolls.

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Anyway—how are you? It’s the Last Call on this month’s Check-In. We’re a few short, but we’ll run them all Tuesday.

Here’s a GREAT example of what we’re looking for. This was one of my all-time favorite submissions:

“My life these days feels like the opening montage to a movie in which they beat the shit out of the main character just to drive the point home that she is down on her luck. Got demoted at work, family member got seriously ill, kid ran away from home. And all the little things that could go wrong are going wrong. Yesterday I went to the hospital with a big bag of stuff and tripped getting out of my car, and everything went flying across the parking deck and now I have a skinned knee. Like, really universe? Was that necessary? But I am still sober.”

EMAIL ME HERE: ajd@thesmallbow.com subject APRIL CHECK-IN

It will be published TUESDAY. Appreciate you!

Anyone who contributes gets a FREE month of TSB’s Sunday edition.

We also donate $25 to the Katal Center each month on behalf of TSB.

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All the regular Sunday rundowns (with new format!), plus, the full “God Box” essay I wrote in 2019 is after the jump. Hope to see you down there, but if we don’t, we'll still love you no matter what. We'll catch up on Tuesday. Stay present and accounted for. Today is today. — AJD