Introduction

We travel through the chapters of our lives much too quickly. My brother-in-law had it right when he said that I had gone through a monumental change when my Grandma (we call her "Toad") passed away.

I get frustrated when every holiday comes and goes. Just like the rest of life, it goes by too fast. It reminds me of that moment when you’re in a car with a close friend and you’re sitting in the car listening to the radio. Suddenly, that close friend of yours changes the channel from a song that you were really enjoying. It wasn’t a song you’d usually listen to, but here you are, singing along in your head with Celine Dion or Justin Timberlake.

It’s a fast forward on an old cassette tape. Sometimes, you’d just rather press rewind and listen just one more time.

My mother had always believed in existential things, like previous lives. I don’t know if I totally believe in them, but I’ve thought and wondered about it from time to time. It’s never that I believed in ghosts or spirit-worlds or angels or devils, but I thought about the differences each person calls his or her own.

Although we live in the same families and are brought up in the same general surroundings as our brothers and sisters, we come out quite differently. Could it be that falling off a bike and wrecking your arm could make a difference in the rest of your life? Could it be that stealing a pack of baseball cards from the 7-11 when I was nine years old made that much of a change on my life as well?

Maybe it did, but it really doesn’t explain why I get just as excited seeing Michelle Kwan skate on ice as I do to seeing Jeremy Roenick knock another hockey player off his skates with a brutal cross check. Why do I like certain cultural things, like Egyptian pyramids and the Great Wall of China, but could care less for Big Ben and English culture?

There must be something.

So, I thought seriously about the possibilities of having previous lives. There must be a better explanation than stolen baseball cards or a great history teacher (which, ironically, I never really had) or even the events that passed through my personal life.

We run from life to life in a seamless fashion. We seldom remember these lives. Then again, we know these lives by heart. They resonate within us in our many differences. We are born essentially as one similar being, but the differences of things we have known though our lifetimes have made us vastly different people. So it goes with past lives. Things I have done in previous lives are very different than the things you have done and the places you have been.
Sometimes it is odd to say "past life." A past life isn't necessarily a state of transcendentalism. It's a state of mind. I don't know that I even necessarily believe in past lives. I do know, though, that there are certain things that you find unimportant that I find consuming. These are the ingredients of my life and the substance of my past lives.

In the aftermath of the World Trade Center catastrophe, it is obvious that there is a finer thread that connects us all. According to transcendentalism, we have all been here in a previous life and we’ll return again and again until we finally get it right.

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