I know it seems like finding the perfect solution to a past problem is worth your time, but it isn’t. Let me explain.
They say that an anxious person is living in the future, and a depressed person is living in the past. But when you fall victim to this trap, you’re indulging both.
You can’t heal from your past if you never accept it, and constantly trying to backtrack looking for an answer doesn’t let you do that. You can’t effectively plan for a future of this same old thing, when it doesn’t yet exist. You don’t know what it would look like to go through this again, which if you try to obsessively guess, will leave you feeling a bit frantic.
Now that’s not to say you shouldn’t try to learn from your past. By all means, do that. But learn what you can and move on. And sometimes, what you can truly learn from a situation isn’t a lot. Sometimes you just learn that you need to be kinder or take care of yourself better. Then it’s your job to figure out how to do that and start putting it into practice.
Your future will naturally bring you new realizations and perspectives on your past, relevant ones to your life as it moves forward. And it’s okay to reflect when you feel necessary, but there is such a thing as too much reflecting.
The fact is, the solutions to your future problems are firmly rooted in the future, right where they should be. And since you can’t go back to the past, perfecting your response to it really gets you nowhere.
So if you’ve been torturing yourself over your past, agonize no longer. Because at that point, reflection has long passed its bounds of usefulness. If you’re wondering, the only way to be free of your past is to simply decide, and let go. It’s easier said than done, that’s true. But if you can keep this perspective in the back of your mind, then that will make living in the moment a little bit easier to practice.
