everything else is crap

During the last couple of months I've been visited by quite a few ghosts from Artman's past. Old acquaintances who've found me through FaceBook and distant relatives phone calling out of the blue. I've bumped into a few past lovers
(in one case literally) and was visited by an old friend and former band mate who I hadn't seen in 40 years.

Now, I accept, as an axiom, the proposition that all we create our own realities. But sometimes it boggles my mind how
that works.
Like now, with all these recent "blasts from the past".
As far as I knew, I was happily living my low-key island life when all these chance encounters came along. What the hell did I do to manifest this stuff? I'm not saying any of this is bad stuff, just very curious.

Understandably, revisiting one's past can run the mind through a gauntlet of memories and emotions, re-open old wounds or re-live past joys, reawaken former pains and prejudices, issues unresolved and unfinished business.
Then there's the boatload of "what ifs" and "whys".
"How could this or that situation been better or worse?" "What difference might it have made to have turned right instead of left?"

Selfish questions all steeped in ego; a sort of feeble attempt to over-master memories of the past and surely not the best of all places for the mind to dwell too long.

Anyway, I put myself through that gauntlet and, in the end, happily came to the place where mind is right, heart is healed and soul is satisfied.
Detached from ego, it's an easy thing to be grateful for those children of God whose lives I've touched and who's lives have touched mine.

Our courses had crossed, drifted their separate ways and now, for some God only knows reason, have briefly crossed again. In the end, all that really matters is the happy knowledge that we're all still weathering the waves and making way
under sail.

Everything else is crap.