The Rear-View Mirror
When is a shadow not a shadow?
There I was, on my usual Saturday shop in one of those hypermarkets that litter the planet and make you feel like you’re living the Truman Show. Frank was telling me through the speakers how he did it ‘My Way’. And that, being one of my faves, it got me warbling along (no need to applaud, thanks).
Sifting through forty different labels of tinned tomatoes as if the fate of the world depends on the salt content totally frazzles my brain. Yet, as Frank sang, I felt warmed, and Trolley and I slow-waltzed through the infinite rows and somehow, the task felt less daunting.
Then Frank hit that line. You know the one. “Regrets, I’ve had a few...”
I was instantly swept back, fifteen, twenty, forty, and more years. The repository opened and, as the lyrics unfolded, my brain dutifully provided a 6D sensory experience with footnotes of every 'wrong' turn, every missed opportunity, every non-’careful step along the byway', and every version of myself I wished had never happened.
By the time the crooner hit his final crescendo, I wasn’t just listening to a song; I was drowning in the fallout of my history.
And there I was with Trolley, reliving the past like it were now: Feeling the ‘My Way’ when I handed in my notice from a great job, the ‘My Way’ when I left my partner of eight years, and the same ‘My Way’ that had made hundreds of rash and impulsive choices.
And then beyond the forty-year mark ..to way back. The heat rose to my cheeks—that prickling, stinging flush. Ears tingling. It was the same dry throat and the sudden ‘awareness’ in my glutes that were about to get smacked as my dad’s anger would erupt, making me feel small and insignificant. That was ‘His Way’.
I was reliving it all. The whole darn experience. The feelings and the thoughts: The frantic loop of "Did I really say that?" and "Why on earth did I leave?" and "What was I even thinking?” and “Was that really me?”
I felt like a ghost, haunting myself. I was trying to find a way to un-happen a moment from decades ago. That heavy ache in my chest, the physical evidence of mistakes I thought I still had to carry. I was just standing there, stuck in the middle of an imaginary wreckage.
So I had lost the plot somewhere between the tomatoes and the pasta.
I looked up and realised I was standing in front of the spaghetti. The pasta aisle had become a waiting room for a life I’d already ruined. It makes you feel like you’re just the debris of your old decisions. I stood there, paralysed by a past that felt more real than the tiled floor under my feet.
I looked at the pasta and I looked at my hands.
A young boy zoomed past on the back of a trolley, laughing like he’d just discovered wheels.
Then a space appeared. And just like that, I zoomed back to reality.
In that tiny gap, it was so obvious: 'now' is not 'then.' Simple and true. It wasn't my past coming to visit me; it was just Thought taking form in the moment. In the presence of that music, it had taken a very convincing, very painful 'Regret' shape.It wasn’t my past coming to visit me; it was just Thought taking form in the moment. In the presence of that music, it had taken a very convincing, very painful ‘Regret’ shape.
The ache in my chest hadn’t travelled through time. It couldn’t have. It was a live performance, being created right there in the middle of the shop.
I’d been leaning my entire being against a shadow.
You know this one. You’ve had your own Frank. A song, a smell, an old phone number, the way light hits a kitchen at a certain hour. Whatever it is, it cues something in you, and the next thing you know, you’re standing in the middle of timelessness with a chest full of regret about something that happened in 1998.
It feels like the past has come to find you. It hasn’t. It can’t. The past isn’t a place. It doesn’t have an address. It can’t reach across forty years and squeeze your chest in a supermarket.
The squeeze is being made now, by thought. The flush in the cheeks, the dry throat, and your version of “Did I really say that?” and “Why on earth did I leave?” All generated fresh in your body right now, so convincing it feels as real now as it did back then.
The shadow had no weight of its own. The shadow never does. A shadow can’t push back at you — there’s nothing there. Whatever weight you feel is your own leaning, showing up as resistance. From me, in the aisle, pressing my whole self into a cue Frank had handed me thirty seconds earlier. Without the leaning, nothing to push against. Same for you, with your own Frank, in your own aisle.
So where does the ache live? Not the story of it, the ache itself. While you read this. Where is it sitting?
Right here. Right now. The ache isn’t the past. It’s Thought, doing what Thought does, generating an experience this very second and handing it to you wearing yesterday’s clothes.
Take a breath. Maybe the sights and sounds around you. The feel of the phone in your hand, if that’s where you’re reading. None of it travelled through time. It’s all here, now, being generated this second. The same as the chair was, the same as Frank and Trolley and the tinned tomatoes were for me. And the ache that felt so important, so solid, so urgent? Same stuff. Same kind of thing. Just experience, being made, in the moment..
And underneath all of it, underneath your version of it too, something steady. The thing that’s been watching the whole show. Wholly disinvested in ‘your Way’, or anyone else’s. It was here through every regret you’ve ever had. It’s here now, reading this with you. Sydney Banks pointed to it. Plenty of others have, too, by other names.
Frank can keep his way. I’ll take the air that comes back when I stop warbling.
In any case, Save the Last Dance for Me is piping through the speakers now (she said, staring wistfully at Trolley).
I keep a few spaces available every week for one-off conversations. It is my treat. Bring whatever you are sitting with and we will take a proper look at it together. Message me here if you’d like to.
PS — If any of this has landed and you want to sit with it a little longer, my short primer What No One Ever Told Us is in the paid tier. It is a good next step for anyone ready to look at how all of this actually works.