A few years ago I walked into an old house I had never been in before, and from the doorway I had the feeling I knew what I would see in the next room. There was no vision, I heard no voice from beyond and, luckily, no long-dead relative was waiting for me by the window. For a few seconds the place was simply familiar. So familiar that I wanted to open one of the doors and check whether what I expected was behind it. That was when I thought how strange our memory is. We remember things we would gladly forget, we forget why we walked into the kitchen, and every now and then we recognize something that, according to our own biography, we have never seen.
It was moments like these that sparked my curiosity about a question I find far more interesting than who I was in a past life. I might have been a rich woman with beautiful dresses, a poor woman with five children, a merchant, a healer, or someone whose life was so ordinary that nobody ever found a reason to write it into history. All of that is intriguing, but if I could look back only once, I would choose a completely different moment. I would ask to see my last day.
If I Could See Just One Day
Think about what that would mean. You know your time is running out, and the whole life that felt vast only a moment ago slowly gathers around a few important things. The person you love may be beside you. You may be far away from them and thinking of exactly them. You may be looking at your home, knowing you will never come back to it. You may remember a promise you can no longer keep, or realize with painful clarity how long you kept putting off something you believed there would always be time for.
And that is where my version of this story begins: if the soul carries memory from one life to the next, what would be strong enough to stay with it?
I imagine this memory as a scent that lingers on clothing long after the person has left the room. You can't see where it comes from, and after a while you're not even sure what it reminds you of, but the moment you catch it, something in you responds. That is how those inexplicable recognitions feel to me, the ones that appear in our lives and for which we never quite find the right drawer.
The People We Recognize
You meet someone and, while you're still talking about the most ordinary things, you feel a closeness that runs ahead of your acquaintance. An hour later you know this person will matter, even though you have not a single sensible reason to know it. Other times the reaction is the opposite, and someone makes you close up before they've done anything at all. If we believe in reincarnation, both encounters may carry an old story, because the soul would hardly remember only the people with whom everything went beautifully.
I'm especially drawn to those relationships where the feeling is far too big for the time two people have known each other. The other person is late with a single reply, and a fear wakes up in you as if you had been waiting for that reply your whole life. Someone drifts away, and in place of ordinary disappointment comes an almost physical sense that you are once again losing something very precious. That's when I would love to be able to open that old book and read its last page. Perhaps two people parted there with a promise to find each other. Perhaps one of them waited and the other couldn't come back. Perhaps a love was simply left without its final sentence.
If a story like that is possible, meeting in this life takes on a completely different meaning. The two now have new names, new faces, different families and a whole pile of new habits with which they have yet to get on each other's nerves, and still the old sense of recognition may have survived between them. And I would like to know what we do with it now. Do we repeat the same story, do we finish it, or have we been given the chance to choose differently this time?
The Old Promise
The old promise interests me just as much. In one life a person may have said "I'll come back", "I'll take care of you" or "I won't leave you" and believed those words with all their heart. Life, however, has an unpleasant habit of ignoring our arrangements. If the end came before the promise could be kept, is it possible that the sense of duty remained?
That would explain, in a beautiful and slightly sad way, why someone in their present life always feels responsible for everyone. Why they find it so hard to walk away from a person they outgrew long ago. Why they keep rescuing, waiting and carrying more than belongs to them. When asked why, they usually have plenty of reasonable explanations, but beneath them there often lives a simple "I have to." It is exactly this "I have to" that I would love to trace back.
The Home the Soul Longs For
With home the story becomes even more curious. You can arrive in a foreign country as a tourist and leave three days later feeling you've left something of yours behind. A street feels close to you, a certain view shakes you, an old house catches your attention more than all the landmarks you dutifully saved on your phone. I would very much like to know whether the soul can long for an address the present person has never had.
I picture someone who, on their last day, thought about home. About the table the family used to sit around, the tree outside the window, the noise of the street, a door they had walked through thousands of times. If they were far from all of it, perhaps their last wish was simply to go home. And if such a wish remained somewhere deep inside, meeting the same place centuries later could bring that inexplicable feeling: "I know this place."
The Life Left for Later
What draws me most, though, is another possibility. What if, on their last day, a person thinks about the life they wanted to live and kept leaving for later?
This feels painfully human to me, because we are all masters of "later on". I'll travel when the moment is right. I'll write the book when I have time. I'll change jobs when I feel ready. I'll say what I feel when I'm sure. I'll start living the way I want once this is over, that has passed and everyone around me is finally happy. That is how one "in a minute" can quietly swallow years.
If a life ended with exactly such an unfulfilled wish, I love the thought that it may return. That's why I would look with particular attention at the dreams we can't manage to give up. The ones we have declared impractical, too late, too complicated or plainly silly, and yet some time later we find them in front of us again. As if life were asking: "Right, are we doing it this time, or are we going to discuss it again?"
Threads in the Present Life
Perhaps that is why the last day of a past life fascinates me so much. In it I could see what I loved strongly enough to want to hold on to it. I would learn what I had promised, where I had wanted to return, and what I regretted not having had enough time for. And then I would look for the same threads in the life I am living now.
This is exactly where the game becomes truly intriguing. If there was a person on my last day, I want to know whether I have met them again. If there was a promise, I want to find out whether I am still keeping it. If I left a home behind, I would look for the place that draws me today for no clear reason. If I left a dream unlived, I would look around for the desire that has refused to leave throughout my present life.
There's no way to pull out a fifteenth-century passport and check the stamps, however convenient that would be. For me the point lies elsewhere: when I look at a present story through the idea of a past life, I can see a connection I had been missing until now. And sometimes one different question is enough to tell a familiar story in a completely new way.
A Small Experiment
So I'd like us to try a small experiment. After this article you will see eight scenes. Look at them the way you would look at eight old photographs found by chance in someone else's album. One of them will probably catch your eye more than the others. It may be a detail, a face, an object, or simply the feeling that comes with it. Choose it, and then read the story I have left behind that image.
After the test we can open the book a little further with Tarot. There we'll look for the life itself behind the trace you chose: what kind of person you were, what world you lived in, who mattered to you, what happened towards the end, and what from that story you may recognize in your present life. The last question interests me most, because a past life becomes truly intriguing when it helps us understand something about this one.
And before you choose your scene, think for a moment: if tonight someone placed before you the last page of one of your past lives, which name, place, promise or unlived dream would you hope to find on it?
The next step