Years ago I had a shrink who told me to imagine a bridge. Okay, I said. He wanted me to see myself in the present on one side. Okay. Next, on the other side of the bridge, I was to see myself in the future. Okay. So I closed my eyes and I saw myself first on one side and then on the other. I didn’t look any different. I didn’t feel any different. And the things I wanted changed in my life, through crossing the bridge it is presumed, seemed just as stubbornly out of reach as before. Because nothing had happened. One minute on one side—the next on the other. What was it that had caused the change I wanted to occur? The shrink did not have an answer.

I did not know how to change. The shrink wasn’t about to tell me. So my life became about discovering the bridge itself. And this bridge was a bridge I would never finish crossing. Because while I was on the bridge, I was looking back at where I’d been. Looking back at the past. The past is always there to look back upon. The future is always there to look forward to. Meanwhile, there’s the present, bridging the two.

But I now have a name for the bridge. I call it the Story Bridge. It is a bridge of perception.

The stories we tell about the past, create the present. Though past events cannot be changed, they are continually open to interpretation.

My perception of the past has altered since events occurred in real time. Where once I was resigned but suffering, then forgiving and suffering, I now see myself as the creator of a past where there is nothing to forgive and everything to understand and accept.

This is purely a result of the Story Bridge. Of writing and rewriting my story, not in any way that would change the facts or alter what happened, but that would create a scenario I could rejoice in. Because I connected to a higher story. A soul story. The story of a consciousness unfolding.

I am the result not only of my experience, but of a continually expanding consciousness. One that reexamines, seeks not to blame, is eternally curious, and believes in Goodness.

While staying faithful to the facts, this consciousness re-forms my experience whenever I cross the Story Bridge.

Come, cross the Story Bridge
Reimagine the past
Hardly over and done with
Alive as it is with memory
Bend like a bow bridge
Stretch not the facts but imagination.

© Nancy Wait