As many often advise, visit your past once in some way, but don’t rent a house there … but don’t many of us love to sing the title track of ‘poor me’? Do we do this to seek empathy or simply to prevent ourselves from making the same mistakes over and over again? I was once told, to forget old memories, you have to create new ones … sad, the same is so strange and maddening for those who have lost their near and dear ones to catastrophes or tragedies beyond their control.
This is all so incisively ironic. Sometimes, based on the past, we adjudicate our current actions to avoid setbacks in the near future. Whereas sometimes we shrug off the past to refrain from losing what we have (for the future). But why does the circle of life return us to the same place, the same place where we were a few years or months ago? Is it to test us if we have learned the lesson well or simply to heal?
The sooner we free ourselves from regrets, the faster we will be more receptive to a new wave of exciting experiences. That is, why walk through life walking down the street backwards. Forget “what’s behind” and hold onto “what’s ahead.” To that end, I would say that a positive approach to dealing with past setbacks would be not to ask “why me?” In fact, why not me?
Some of us, to coin a phrase, have become masochists. We get satisfaction from revisiting our painful past, but again, who am I to judge?
I always see it this way, maybe some people came into our lives to toughen us up, while others to help us get in touch with our suppressed emotions. The advent of some may have carved wounds in us, while others may have healed some that we never knew prevailed. Time waits for no one and the happy moments we spend with our loved ones simply become treasured memories that keep reappearing after they are gone. So, let’s learn to live in the moment happily, enjoy everything we find and enjoy, not based on past, expectations or earnings.
‘Better an oops than what ifs’ – Isn’t it better to fail while doing something than to have to live with regret that you didn’t try it when you were given the chance to do it? Also, the sooner we close the old doors, the new ones open. So why does doubt run through them for fear of the past? Why not consider the exits as entrances to another place?