What to toss. What to keep.

I was driving down Hennepin at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. praying that the needle on my—what do you call that?—thermostat on my car would go down. It creeped up slowly from Franklin to Lagoon, paused right before the red, then started coming back down.

There was a guy on the radio who may have been some evangelical preacher of some kind giving advice to people. Not so much a preacher as some kind of psychic who could apparently heal through the airwaves.

“Janice, Janice, Janice!” he said. “You have a block like a river dam. You’re attracting creeps into your life because you’re still in love with someone else! You’ll never move on until you let go, Janice. This man you love? It’s never going to happen. I’m here to help you.”

“Really?” Janice said. “Oh, how did you know!”

There was a pause.

“There. Feel that? Did you feel that Janice? A tingling sensation throughout your body?”

“Yes!” Janice said, “Not really a tingling, though, more like my hands got hot.”

“That’s it,” he said. “Just like that I tore down that block and you have let go. You’re free to move on. I see you starting a romance with someone within the next month. Someone who is in your life right now who you haven’t ever noticed before. You two will be happy together.”

The guy went on like this—proclaiming the truth of people’s problems and tearing down blocks and predicting all the good things that would happen to them now that their internal alleys are free and clear. The DJ occasionally interrupted to tell us how jammed the phone lines were.

So last night I was driving to a gathering in another town. It happens to be very close to the house of someone I dated. He’s probably the only guy I’d actually throw a drink in the face of, or perhaps punch in the eye, if I saw him today. Every other time I’d driven this route was full of happiness and comfort because I drove it to see him. Driving it now, my anxiety level now increased in some sort of Pavlovian way.

Oh, it all came back—the automatic way I turned here and there. Then, the mental movie reel of The Scene of Disaster wheeled out from its corner and started to play in my mind. I stopped it—the playback—because now I have the ability to intercept the thoughts. I wished some nice evangelical psychic nutjob would come and blow the movie reel downstream with a power washer and make my head tingle and tell me that now that the dam has been broken up and swept away. All will be clear and the future will only be good. That sounds nice. But it doesn’t work that way.

Frankly, I want to hang onto some of the Bad Experience river dam. I've already hacked through most of it, and unless you practically drop me in front of his house, I'm in a great place. We've all go them. Parent stuff, relationship stuff, friend stuff, our own stuff. Yes, Old Stuff hurts, but it also does us some good: If a caveman goes into a cave and gets munched on by a tiger, chances are he’ll learn something about what caves not to go into ever again. So: Do we need the bad things to entirely go away? Is remembering and reliving and “working through” them all the best way to do that?

It leaves a lot of questions about what stays on our minds—what to let go and what to hang on to. And how, how, how, unless we enlist the help of Evangelical Guy, do we let go of what needs releasing ourselves? Is it deliberate? A choice? Something that happens naturally over time? Can we help it happen faster? That’s what I’d like to know.