Kethuvim

"But Lot's wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt."

For those who don't know, those preceding words come from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. God tells what appears to be the only good family in either town to get out of town on the double, because he's going to destroy it. His messenger tells them not to look back. Lot and his family leave, and then it happens, Lot's wife looks back and becomes a salt lick.

Seems a bit excessive doesn't it? Seems a little harsh for a woman to become like stone simply for looking back as the life she knew was destroyed in a hellish explosion. Is it possible that there's something else going on here? A bigger truth? A bit of metaphor?

I sat in my office last week as a high school girl fought back tears as she described a good friendship that had dissolved. She's been pouring a ton of time into trying to salvage the friendship, and the other person just doesn't seem all that interested. She said, "I just wish it was like it used to be." Ah, the cry of every human being. We've all felt that way. We've all longed for "the good ole' days." We've all spent time trying to re-create the past. This girl had become a pillar of salt. Her life is at a stand still because she was doing nothing but looking back. She's incapable of living now, because she's trying to live then.

You don't really think that the 50 year old guy who buys the Porsche on a whim is really just buying a Porsche because he wants one, do you? We call it a mid-life crisis, but really what it boils down to is he feels like his life is over, so he tricks himself into believing that he can regain "the glory days" by purchasing a shiny sports car. Instead of living now, he's living then. Pillar of salt.

What about the 50 year old woman who dresses like a teenager? You don't really think she dresses that way because she likes the way the clothes look, do you? She's convinced that her best days re in the past, and that she can't look 50 and be beautiful. So what happens? She injects her face with botulism, shops at Abercrombie, gets a boob-job, and wears insane amounts of make-up, simply so she can live in the past. She's immobilized by her age. She's trying to stop time, so that she can re-live her glory days as a cheerleader. She lives then, so that she can avoid the sagging and wrinkles of now. Pillar of salt.

I'm kind of tired of nostalgia. I think it immobilizes us. I call it the "Uncle Rico syndrome." In Napolean Dynamite, Uncle Rico is constantly living in his past. He even says at one point, "Don't you just wish you could go back; do it all over again?" We can't live in two places at once. We either live life now, or we live it then, we can't do both.

Your old life is over. What happened in the past (good and bad) is gone. Shake the crust of salt off of yourself, turn around, and start moving ahead. There's too much life to be had now to focus on the life you had then.