Last night I joined a friend for the first of a four-part class on “The Power of Now,” a book by Eckhart Tolle, author of “The Good Earth.”  In a nutshell (and keep in mind I haven’t read the book), the class is about striving to be present and in the moment as much as possible, which means letting go of past and future worries, and concentrating on simply achieving peace (albeit a peace and joy that is not characterized by positive or negative emotion, but simply “is”).  To tell you the truth, I had a hard time with these concepts.  To me, any joy a person feels is always relative to the negative feelings they’ve experienced.  In addition, I don’t feel true peace or joy is ever sustainable because any human knows that it is transitory. 

In any event, it got me to thinking about what makes heroes in fiction so appealing, and to me one of the biggest things is that heroes are affected by both past and future events.  Usually they have suffered to a certain degree, but despite this they have a dream of the future (even if this dream is buried so deep they don’t even acknowledge it to themselves). 

Heroes are shaped by their past because it is what made them who they are today and, inescapably, it is what motivates their actions as they try to achieve their future goals.  Because I usually write about how a hero’s tortured past motivates him, I wanted to give a much more light-hearted example of how a hero’s past, even in a small snippet, can intrigue us and make us feel that much closer to him.

In Shannon McKenna’s Melt Down, Michael MacNamara is as macho as they come, but when the heroine teases him about being like her fairy godmother, he replies, “Oh great,” he said sourly.  “What a turn on.  Bippity boppity boo.”  To the amused heroine, he reveals that he raised his sister and that he “knows his Disney.”

To me, this small insight into the hero’s past reveals so much about who he is and he’s more than the macho, alpha, highly-sexed hero we’ve seen so far.  So while I definitely think being in the moment and achieving peace is a worthy goal, I also feel you achieve that moment by accepting and embracing all that has happened and can happen in your life.  In the end, it’s all good—if only because you have gotten past it and continue to dream of better.

QUESTION: FORGET THE PAST OR EMBRACE IT?