How many of us are plagued by memories of our failures, our embarrassments and our regrets? How often do we dwell in the past, reliving and rehashing the things from our past that we wish never happened, or worse still, we use to define who we are today? And of course, there’s thinking of others for whom we still carry some sort of blame for what they should-a, would-a, or could-a done – but didn’t.
The past is the past and you can’t go back and change it. And I know that when I’m focussed on the past, I’m missing out on something precious. The right here and the right now.
Memories carry with them the emotions of that time so, if we are reliving events from the past that have negative emotions attached to them, then that’s what we are experiencing now.
It’s not just a waste of energy. It’s also a missed opportunity to be experiencing the joy of the precious moment of now.
Living in the past – which is what we do when we dwell on memories – robs us of living in the present. We stay in our minds, in the past, in the negative emotions – on something that is no longer real. It no longer exists. It is just a memory. A thought.
If you find yourself going back in time and reliving an experience over and over again, perhaps it’s time to reposition the meaning of that event so that the experience propels you forward, rather than keeping you stuck in the past.
What advice would you give to a dear friend if they shared the same story with you? You may give them some sympathy at first, but eventually, you’d be looking at ways to re-position their story so that they can see the lessons learnt. They may have learned something about themselves or perhaps about someone else.
Remember, as painful as the experience may have been at the time, the experience no longer exists in the here and now.
So, next time your mind goes into rewind mode, just see if you can view the events in your mind through a different lens – a lens of the present – and see if there was another, more helpful meaning attached to it.
You may not be able to change the past, but you certainly have the power to re-write its significance in your life.
