Looking Back on the Open Letter Continuum

tyunglebower ♦ December 11, 2014 ♦ Leave a comment

The year is coming to an end, and with it, the regular appearance of the Open Letter Continuum. It has been an interesting, sometimes, difficult, sometimes rewarding and all times useful exercise in revisiting and releasing.

Some of the letters I addressed to those I think about fondly still. Others are addressed to those I’d rather not think about, and usually don’t except for when they invade my mind. When I came up with this idea a year ago, I hoped that it would help me pull the former closer into my heart, and to banish the latter to a safe distance within my psyche-still there but at long last (in some cases) dealt with, at least in some degree.

I’d say that I both achieved these goals and did not. I feel better about myself for some of the things I wrote about. The good memories of the decent people are all the warmer now that I’ve shared them with my readers. The pain is ever so slightly dissipated because of this project.

In another sense I didn’t fully succeed, because such things are never complete. While we mustn’t be ruled by our feelings of past events, we are constructed by them nonetheless. Though we may not examine the wounds or the blessings each hour, we stand before the world and before ourselves a product of all of them. Looked at it in this light, the best we can do is to enhance who and what we are through proper use of both the good and the bad that have come into our lives. We can’t 100% reignite the warm memories and lock away the bad ones. But we can learn, and be sincere with ourselves, and I tried to do that with each post this year in the Continuum.

And it is a continuum, isn’t it? As long as we live, we till the soil of our spirits and souls, some things becoming buried, other things coming to the surface, and all contributing to the birth of a new crop which we must one day harvest, thus making room for more tilling, more planting. It goes on as we go on. It’s a continuum.

I didn’t come close to writing open letters to everyone with whom I have unfinished business. But since the turning of that soul soil must continue, I may yet, in years to come, write periodic open letters again here on the blog. And again, when you read them, as hopefully happened when you read the ones from this year, you’ll get to know me better, and I will continue to get to know myself better as well.

This post “concludes” the Open Letter Continuum.