Ghosts of the Past

Tom was alone.  His friends abandoned him in his greatest hour of need.  And to put acid into the wound, his wife left him when he needed her the most.  Fortunately being the ice queen that she was, she never bore him children.  Tom's despair was so great that he took his own life.  He left a note that explained his reasoning:  being alone and unloved was the worst feeling in the world - death was preferable over life.  But, Tom was never alone and neither are we.  

We all have Ancestors; many of them.  And they always are with us.  They are present in our DNA and our unconscious mind.  Take a look at these numbers from ancestry.com:  

This chart does not include those folks that we refer to as aunts and uncles, just a direct blood-line. Using the chart above, if you assign the average age of 60 per generation, you only pass through about 600 to 700 years of ancestral family and time.  When you continue the math, you will find that your Great-Grandparents number in the hundreds of thousands.  And pilgrim, they all smile upon you; you are the direct result of their lives - in many ways, you are them and they are you.  

To get to you, your ancestors (and mine) survived extreme weather, glacial periods, tribal conflicts, war, drought, and famine (this is the short list).  You/we are their direct beneficiaries.  We carry all of them in our DNA and our unconscious mind (maybe I'm being redundant but calling attention to  these things may lead the interested reader to investigate the latest findings in DNA.  Also, the interested may want to look into Jung's Collective Unconscious).    

Unfortunately, there are too many folks like Tom that are driven to their end by that feeling of loneliness.  Discovering your ancestry can help but then discovering that they are constantly with you can sweep away those desperate feelings.  You never really walk alone because your ancestors are not ghosts of the past but a present reality.   

I strongly urge everyone to discover their ancestral roots.  There are many companies, including the one above who can take your DNA and explore your past.  It is a real adventure.

Thanks to ancestry.com for the chart!


                                            Copyright @ 2016 Terry Unger