Stop Living In The Past

Don’t waste your thought time on the things you can’t change

I’ve done a lot of soul-searching recently. Trying to unravel the complexities of my past, that now define the man I am today.

Looking back at my mistakes, I realize, I don’t regret them.

Regret is wishing you hadn’t taken a particular action.

The reason I don’t feel any regret is not because I shouldn’t have done the things that I‘ve done, because I certainly shouldn’t have, it’s because I’ve learned from those experiences. I’ve become a better person because of them. Or at least I hope I have.

Erasing those experiences only erases the lessons I’ve learned. I only wonder how much higher I would have climbed before falling down. The outcome could have been much more severe if I learned those lessons even later in life.

Those experiences have made me the man that I am today. I’m happy with who I am. Not perfect by any means. I still make mistakes. I still stumble. I still fall. But I get back up and I keep trying.

I’m not trying to live a life that I regret, I’m trying to live a life of learning. If I regret then I haven’t learned. I want to learn. I want to do better.

Remorse is admitting your mistakes and taking responsibility.

But just because I don’t regret my actions doesn’t mean I don’t feel remorse. Of course, I feel remorse. I feel terrible that I hurt another. I am sad that I made the wrong decision. I’m ashamed that I failed to live up to my potential. I feel remorse.

It’s because I feel remorse that I know I’ll never repeat those actions. It’s because I feel remorse that I’ve learned to make better decisions. It’s because I feel remorse that I am working tirelessly to become the best version of myself that I can.

While I do feel remorse for the things that I’ve done, I can’t live there. I can’t live in the past where nothing can change and nothing can be accomplished.

Spend your thought time on the things you can actually change.

I don’t want to spend all of my days thinking about what could have been. What ifs are a waste of time. They’re a waste of my thought time. I have far better things to think about. I have the day-to-day things to manage. I have a future to plan for. I don’t have time to waste living in the past where nothing gets accomplished and nothing can change.

What can I change? I can change my present and my future. But I can never change my past. So why live there? Why spend time and energy imagining what my life could have been when I could be planning and working toward what it still can be? Let’s not waste more time. Let’s not create more regret. Live in the moment and prepare for the future.

We must learn to leave our mistakes in the past or we’ll be doomed to repeat them.

Second changes are meaningless if we don’t learn from our mistakes.

We can’t change the past but we can learn from it. We can make sure that we avoid those same mistakes again. We can learn to better handle similar situations. We can learn to overcome our past rather than have it overwhelm us.

We can choose to be better than what our past tries to define as who we are. We can find real growth in learning from our past mistakes.

Otherwise, do we even deserve a second chance if we don’t learn from our mistakes?

If you don’t learn from your mistakes, then they become regrets. — John Cena