Sometimes we look back over our shoulders to a time in our lives when things seemed better for us and yearn for those days to return. “They were simpler times”, we tell ourselves, “I knew what my life was about. Today I cannot seem to get a grip on any part of my life.” Sound familiar?
As you know by now we can no more live in the past, or more concisely, live in our memory of what that past was than we can breathe underwater. I emphasize ‘our memory of the past’ because that is usually what we are dealing with; our imperfect memory. Events, things and life in general come upon us so rapidly; that is the natural order of things, and as painful or uncomfortable as this may be, holding our hands over our eyes and stomping our feet while yelling “no, no, no” will have no effect over what we have to do this day. Refighting the Civil War, the result will not change. Decisions politicians made a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, even a decade ago, we cannot change them today, heck, even the resolutions we made and broke January 1 cannot be undone. Lamenting what might have been is a sure pathway to sadness and discomfort.
What we can do is learn from the past, resolve not to repeat the same choices that leave us dissatisfied today. We can learn from the past, we cannot live there or use the past to justify our choices today. Each choice we make today must be based upon what we know today, what we know right now. This is why, in the book Think, Believe, Receive, I devote an entire chapter to NOW. No matter what we have done in the past we can only operate from the NOW. Give TBR a read and find out yourself how freeing NOW can be.
