Moving on to your future

The other day, out of nowhere, I heard in my mind, "pillar of salt." I don't know if you ever have seemingly random words or phrases pop into your mind or not, but I do sometimes. Usually, I'll follow them up with some thought or googling. 

The only pillar of salt I know of is in the Bible story of Lot and his wife leaving Sodom and Gomorrah and being told not to look back. Lot's wife looked back, and God then turned her into a pillar of salt. 

I don't think I've ever given much thought to this since I learned it 40 years ago in Sunday school. 

What if, like many things, the meaning was actually figurative or symbolic? 

For those who aren’t familiar with the story, it's basically that these cities had turned away from God and were full of debauchery and awful goings on. Lot and his wife took major issue with this but weren't able to sway anyone's mind to cut out the nonsense, and they were either told by God or decided to pack up and leave. I think it was told by God. 

This was their home, their entire life. All their certainty and security in the familiar were here. So leaving felt like a loss even though it was a terrible place that didn't show any signs of ever getting better, regardless of their best efforts. 

When they left, they were told not to look back. Lot's wife did, and instantly became a pillar of salt. Was this punishment for looking back or was it just the outcome of looking back that God tried to warn them about beforehand? 

Salt in the Bible represents permanence, preservation, and sacrifice, among other things. She could have been turned into stone, or dirt, but salt was specific. 

Preservation with salt is for meats because at a high concentration, nothing can grow in it and it prevents breakdown and decomposition. 

Permanence means that's how it will always be. 

Sacrifice means losing one thing for another because you can't have both. It's often considered in an altruistic sense, but it doesn't have to be. 

So because Lot's wife looked back at the awful place that she had already decided to leave, she became frozen there in time, forever. 

Unable and not even wanting to go back, but also unable to move forward because her attention was not on stepping forward into the unknown, but on looking back at the awful past. She sacrificed her future for her past. 

So then thinking on what the relevance of the pillar of salt is today, maybe it is a powerful metaphor for a lot of limitations within the self-help sphere. 

When we are leaving something known and awful; whether it be a marriage, relationship, family, friendship, job, or even prior way of functioning, we may not feel as though we can move on until we understand why everything was as it was. 

Maybe the thinking is that it's a necessary part of healing and that without understanding it, it may repeat in the future. There is validity to that. 

Relfection is a good thing, but dwelling means to live there. 

It's very easy these days to search out narcissists or enmeshment, codependency, or all sorts of other damaging dynamics that you may have been a part of for a long time without realizing it. But if you do enter that rabbit hole, it can become never ending. There is validation and relating to so many scenarios and feeling empowered with knowledge. But is that actually happiness? 

And maybe it is good to give yourself time and space to process and immerse yourself in that kind of material to understand some of the past for self-closure. Or maybe the point is that you need a certain distance away from it before you should reflect, because just having left that mindset, the world still looks much different than it will when you're away from it and well into your next chapter. 

The point really is to not sacrifice your future for your horrible past, or even your great past that faded into a tolerable more recent one. If you lived in something terrible for 20 years, another 20 years spent analyzing it means you've never fully left it and missed out on another 20 years that could have been much different. 

You've got to decide when and for how long you will reflect, process, and try to understand and why. If the goal is to wake up in the morning with your first thoughts being positive, free, and on the day ahead, then the last thoughts before bed can't have been on reliving an argument that you were right about 10 years ago where you say the right thing in your imagination and feel both validated because it would have been better, and powerless because it still happened the way it did and won't ever be able to be changed. 

You have to do what feels best for you. Your future is wide open, but if your eyes are constantly turned to the past, you're going to be frozen in time as it passes you by.

-Doe Zantamata