Upcoming Events

Coming to Terms with Our Digital Past

Coming to Terms With Our (Digital) Past

Coming to Terms With Our (Digital) Past 2000 1333 Jason Stadtlander

We all have ghosts in our closet, whether we want to admit it or not. And the digital age (the last 15-20 years) has created many new elements in our lives including the creation of massive amounts of digital photography, videos, and historic (digital paper) trails.

Hiding Under Your Nose

I recently purchased a NAS (Network Attached Storage), which is just a fancy way of saying “storage server” that holds all of my family photos, videos and every file I’ve ever created. I’m not going to go into the technical side of things with regards to this unit at the moment, but I will say that after combining all my hard drives onto this unit, I now have over 700,000 photographs. Before you freak out, understand that I’m the keeper of our family archives and there are photos going back to the year 1865 on this NAS.

This unit has facial recognition, location recognition, and several other organizational tools on it. In looking through these photos, I found images hidden to me for years (sometimes decades) and I became acutely aware of the fact that there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of pictures of awkwardness; ‘happy families’ now divorced, ex-girlfriends/boyfriends I never wanted to see again, friends that had become enemies and even photos of myself when I was clearly less than happy. I’m not talking about a ton of them, but enough that it makes me stand back and think about things for a moment.

It is incredibly tempting to select all of these photographs and hit the delete key, after all – that is another marvelous capability of the digital age. However, in doing so, I would deny three things:

  1. The ability to see other people that are still very dear to me that are also in these photos.
  2. The ability to look back and for a moment say to myself, “I may not like them, or like the relationship we (or they) now have (or do not have), but at that moment… that brief moment in my life, I was happy with them and they were important enough for me to capture that photo of.”
  3. The fact that one never knows where life will go and what doors may be opened and closed. Many years down the road, do I really want to regret having deleted a photo of this person or this situation?

Coming to Terms

No matter where we go in life from here on out, there are bound to be photos or connections in your collection, someone else’s collection, out on Facebook, on Twitter, news articles or elsewhere. Sometimes you will have the ability to delete these, but most times you won’t. You can choose to ignore these elements that show you (or others you care about) in situations you may not want to remember, but it doesn’t change the fact that they exist. It is in our nature to pretend that elements in our life don’t exist, to ignore them, to cast them aside if they hurt or cause us pain. The reality is, we are only fooling ourselves. To ignore something doesn’t make it go away, it just makes it easier for us to cope.

So I propose this; At some point, you too will go through your old photos, or you will see an article or post online that has you in it. Step back for a moment and instead of ignoring the post, the photo, the video or the connection – instead, ignore the pain. Think about the positive elements that caused you to be a part of that photo, post or article and allow simply to be. It is part of your past, and there isn’t anything you can do to re-write history. Instead, it is how you choose to deal with your past that allows you to handle the present and the future.

Living in the Past & Resisting Change

Living in the Past & Resisting Change

Living in the Past & Resisting Change 1920 1080 Jason Stadtlander

I feel stressed and I retract my thoughts to a specific memory in my childhood;

I am seven years old, sitting in my father’s green 1970 Chevy pickup on the grey bench seat, more specifically it’s a grey seat cover that covers the original green seat. The aroma of the hot chocolate I’m holding in my gloved hands is strong. Dad had ordered it for me as I was finishing my breakfast at the Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Wooster we visited on the way to the job site. It was our regular ritual for us, having breakfast at Howard Johnson’s during our weekend drives from our home in Canal Fulton to the farm in Loudonville.

The grey floorboard has some scattered dirt and dust on it and it’s lightly raining outside. The old windshield wipers are slowly swishing back and forth, “I love a rainy night” by Eddie Rabbitt is playing on the AM radio and I can feel the warm heat blowing on my feet. I’m wearing a red hooded high-school sweatshirt with a faded eagle on it that my father used to wear his senior year of high school, jeans and a pair of over-sized work gloves ready to help my dad do some landscaping. I’m waiting on him to come back to the truck as he’s talking to the customer. I get bored and lean over to change the dial on the radio, sweeping the little red needle back and forth. I move it down to the 500 kHz range and I hear the dot-dash beeping of Morse code. I have no idea what they are spelling out, but it intrigues me.

My dad then gets into the truck and stops, looks at the radio and then at me. “What is it, dad?” I ask, referring to the beeping on the radio.

“Aliens,” he replies back matter-of-factly. My eyes grew wide.

“I’m kidding. It’s just someone sending a message by Morse code. Probably a HAM radio operator nearby.”

It’s just a memory, one of many from my childhood that brings me peace. A memory of a simpler time (for me) when money, responsibilities, and life didn’t stress me out. There was no internet, no cell phones and no need for anyone to get anything instantly.

It’s not exactly a news flash that our world feels like it is moving and changing faster than ever in recorded history. The reality is of course that it is changing at pretty much the same speed it has for the last hundred and twenty to hundred and forty years.

A little over a hundred years ago, adults (fifty and over) at the time were grappling to understand why on earth anyone would want to get from place to place so fast using a mechanical vehicle when for thousands of years horses and carriages had served just fine. Seventy years ago adults in the same age bracket were resisting the change of getting a television when a radio worked just fine for the family.

Today it befuddles many adults why technology is changing so often and why they are constantly being forced to learn the new innovative technologies. Many of the changes are beneficial, making life easier. Although the constant need to adapt to newer hardware or applications roughly every five years may not be difficult for someone in their twenties and thirties, by the time a person reaches their fifties and beyond, the ability to learn these new innovations becomes profoundly difficult.

It’s only natural to want to return to the simplicity of your youth and fifty years from now, no doubt our children will want to return to the simplicity of a hand-held mobile phone and being able to text one another to keep in touch.

It is this stress of needing to constantly change that forces many of us to reminisce about those times that were perceptively easier in our own lives. But is it healthy to do so? Retreating to those memories is a stress reliever for most people, including myself. There is, however, a difference between thinking about the past and living in it. The past is familiar, we know what happened and we know what the outcomes are of how the past played out. However, pick a memory, at that exact moment in the past your life was changing. You didn’t know what to expect or where your world would go. It stands to reason that at that moment – you thought about your past beyond then to cope with stress.

We as a civilization move on. The world moves forward and we have no choice but to move along with the flow. We may be able to divert the waters of change here and there, but ultimately there is nothing we can do to stop the fact that it changes. We will never “make things great again” and most likely things were not as ‘great’ as we remember them. The truth is, fifty years from now you will look back and remember how great things were in this time. So, as I continue to tell myself every day – enjoy your memories and hold on to them, but embrace the change of the future and work to make a difference in controlling how that change plays out.

Dreams, Heaven and Hell

Heaven, Hell and Everything in Between (Part 2 of 2)

Heaven, Hell and Everything in Between (Part 2 of 2) 1920 1080 Jason Stadtlander

My second part in this two part (see here for part one) series will discuss a little more about [my views on] Heaven, Hell and the what might happen to our soul or consciousness. I welcome any discussions regarding it in the comments below. Some of this may sound like ramblings, but just hear me out and think about what I’m saying and it might make sense. Also, keep in mind – I am not at all asking you to abandon your own religious beliefs, I’m just saying keep an open mind.

I have, in recent years come to wonder if what lies beyond this physical existence may be closer to what we know as our dreams. There is a part of me that believes that when we die, our consciousness goes on to exist wholly in this place and whether or not it is heaven or hell depends on our own quality of mind. If we continually do things to help others or have kindness in our heart or peace in our soul, then perhaps this realm is peaceful and beautiful. If we do things to torment others or have malice in our heart, then we reap what we sow and are treated as such in this dream like afterlife. It may also stand to reason that we have the same free will in this dream-life as well. If we do wrong others in this dream-life, it may be possible even in this dream afterlife to turn that attitude around and find a peace within and with others.

This is all speculative, of course and just a theory.

In the movie; “What Dreams May Come” with Robin Williams, Robin’s character Chris dies and perceives heaven and hell as dreams, finding himself living within his wife’s paintings. His wife who commits suicide is trapped in Hell (a continuous nightmare) and Chris works to bring her out of Hell (thus not being condemned to exist there forever). This is the best embodiment of my theories I have ever seen.

Non-Linear Time and Reincarnation

I believe that there is much more to our existence that we can perceive and that time does not truly exist as linear as we feel it does. It is my thought (and the thoughts of others I’ve met) that time exists all at once, past present and future and it is our own physical existence (corporeal existence) that forces us to perceive it as a linear path. In this scenario, perhaps the concept of reincarnation is not quite how we have been taught it might be. Perhaps reincarnation is more the understanding of “omni-time” and the ability to see all time at once, viewing the multiple corporeal embodiments that already exist for our soul?

My father and many people I know would come back and say, what about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit (I was raised Christian)? And that is a good question. There’s no reason to believe that these constructs are not real, my perspective is that they just may not exist exactly as we are taught. I once had a dream that I was in this place, a train station (that vaguely resembled Paddington Station), with thousands of other people. The people I met were continuously directing me to “the conductor”. When I got there, I saw a man that looked similar to what we have been taught Jesus must look like. In this dream, Jesus was the conductor of souls, pointing people to trains on one track or another. It’s an interesting idea, but it goes against free will, unless we have the power to say ‘no’ when we are told to go to a specific track. And, if our dream-life operates like a train, taking us from place to place, can we simply jump off the train at any time?

Before I let you go, think about one last concept, if each person that dies goes to Heaven or Hell, imagine the actual quantity of people that would be at any of these given locations. We have 7 billion souls on earth (that are living). It has been calculated that there have been 107 billion people born in human history. But that is just the length that we believe ‘human history’ may exist, there is no reason to believe that we haven’t existed even longer or through multiple iterations of our civilizations.

 

Blood and Water

Blood and Water 150 150 Jason Stadtlander

The blood pumps in your veins
And keeps you alive;
From the family you came
It’s all that survives.

What now of that blood
And how it connects you;
It can bury you in mud
Or it can make you blue.

The wrath of the kin
Clouds the sky with stark grey;
Drives a spike through the sin
Keeps the angels away.

That blood also flows
Through your body and mind;
In all that it shows
Alone it is blind.

How then can you choose
What path you must take;
Tolling on kin to amuse
Or in solitary wake.

To stand proud and be kind
Regardless of blood;
The water will then unwind
For it too is a flood.

Water is not as thick as blood
For blood will endure;
If you allow it to bud
Only then is it pure.

Water crests in a wave
But then it is gone;
Leading only to save
What once was in sun.

The life giving liquid
Leads toward your future;
It need not be frigid
Or twist you with torture.

Do not let your blood haunt you
Or betray you it will;
Follow your heart true
And your life it will fill.

Back to top