“We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past. But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here NOW with the power to shape your day and your future.”
~ Steve Maraboli
There is something that I have been working on within myself for a long while and still not yet entirely perfected. It's a daily practice that reminds me of the current day, where I am and who I am.
I have been trying to get rid of my regrets from my past. It is probably high up on the list of philosophical questions that stump people and make them stop in their tracks as the life reels play in their minds of things they did, experienced, endured through - that they would far rather remove entirely from their existence.
The past is part and parcel of who we are. Everything that we live through helps to create us as a person. It shapes our ways, thoughts and attitudes. It either helps to push us higher and make us better or on the contrary can be what makes the paint peel as we dissolve and let it tear us asunder.
Every person that walks has a past. We are all united in that and yet, not everyone carries regret with them over it. Perhaps that's the part where it gets tricky. Having to go through the box of regrets and simply be ok with how things happened. Not necessarily accepting that they were right or denying that they took place (that's impossible), but simply coming to terms with the fact that those happenings took place, that there is regret and then letting go of that feeling and coming to terms with it. There is no way to change it, but we can change how we feel about it.
I recently wrote a comment on a post about discarding all the material belongings that I've been lugging around with me from place to place more out of a need to not insult people who gave me gifts along the way. Things that have sentimental value and those that don't. I have a lot of stuff that I shouldn't still be carrying with me.
Perhaps the two go together. The day I wrote that comment I had already made up my mind that I was going to discard the whole lot. There's really no point in keeping a storage room filled to the brim with trinkets and gadgets if they are simply being kept to placate some outdated form of servitude to those that are not even alive anymore.
The minute that I made the decision, it literally felt like a huge weight had left me. I'm not sure if it was just the mental image of letting all that stuff go, or if it was the emotional feeling of relief from it - but it made a substantial impact.
Suddenly I was free to give items away, sell them, discard them and not feel ashamed about it.
I think I need to do the same with my regrets from the past. They served their purpose to educate me and lessons were learned from those instances; but are they still serving me well or are they too now a type of mental enslavement that I revisit and harshly criticize myself again and again for them? Surely this is not useful to moving forward successfully or to building up the self esteem I lost along that path to do better next time. How long do you have to berate yourself over the same mistakes?
Steve Maraboli got it right - they do not define who you are. Sure, they had their place in making you who you are, but your entire persona should not be entrenched in your regrets and there's no reason to continue reliving them. You made choices at the time with the information that you had at your disposal and would you make the same choices now? In some instances the answer might be yes - that means that even though you have regrets about what happened, you still made the right (albeit difficult) choice at the time. If you answered no, then it means that you've learned a lesson from it and that the regret can be acknowledged and then dismissed.
So this is the path that I am on now. A path where I can look back and acknowledge my regrets, but no longer let them have an impact on my here and now. I think that's empowering and quite liberating to know that I'll do better next time and I can finally let it go.