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Time. In this plane of existence, it’s an inevitable force to be reckoned with. No one has been able to slip through the fingers of the tightly closing fist we call time. It catches up to all of us eventually. Yet, even in our limited understanding of how time works, we can teleport ourselves to the past or future using nothing other than our minds, which can be advantageous and disastrous, depending on how you use it. For many, it’s a valuable tool for navigating the present moment and potential future events. For others, it becomes a prison trapping you in a cycle of would haves, could haves, and should haves that can be difficult to break out of. This is why today we will delve into the topic of the past you so desperately cling to, as clinging to the past is a surefire way to hold you back from experiencing true peace and joy in your life.
How do I know? Because I’ve lived it.
Ruminating was and still is a close friend of mine, but there’s a difference in how I play the game now compared to how I used to play it. It is much more productive instead of being filled with strife and frustration.
What do I mean by this?
I struggled with extreme depression for years, and during that time, I would ruminate a lot on how unfair life was. I looked at my past and blamed anyone and anything except for myself for the state I found myself in.
If I didn’t like a situation, it was always someone else’s fault; I was rarely to blame. Not only was it their fault, but I also found it difficult to let the situation go.
Instead, it ran on a hamster wheel in my mind, sometimes causing me to think the same thing repeatedly because I couldn’t move beyond the perceived injustice.
Similar to the experience of having to read the same sentence in a book over and over because you aren’t paying attention to what you’re reading because your mind is somewhere else. That’s how it felt when I got stuck in one of those cycles.
Eventually, I would break out of the cycle and move forward, but it was further down the path of why I was right and the other person was wrong.
It was merely a way to justify my misguided feelings about the situation.
A comforting pat on my back, if you will, or a “There, there, see, they’re the ones with the problem” as a way to discard any responsibility I might have had in the situation. And if I genuinely didn’t have responsibility in the situation, then the responsibility of maintaining order in my mind.
Many of these instances happened during my day-to-day routines, whether at school, work, or home. Still, there was an even more significant, overarching sense of shifting and passing the blame for how I felt regarding past situations that may have happened months or even years ago.
I remember being in my early thirties and still trying to prove a point to my parents about why their decisions during my childhood were detrimental to their children’s lives.
Now, I want to be clear about this. I was right in my thinking about many of these situations.
The problem was, it didn’t matter!
How could it? How could blaming my parents for the difficult choices they made 10 or 20 years prior matter one iota today?!
It. Doesn’t. Matter.
The past can’t be changed no matter how much we might want to change it. Yet, we continue to blame the past for where we are and how we feel today.
How the Mind Clings to Preserve Itself
In reality, my desire to be right was simply a way to validate why I found myself where I did in life without taking any responsibility for my choices and actions.
After all, if you feel like a screw-up, worthless, and headed nowhere fast, that certainly can’t be your fault.
Pulling that finger out and pointing it everywhere is much easier as long as it’s not the center of your forehead.
Because if you point your finger at yourself, how do you rationalize all the wasted years you’ve spent not being who you should be? Who you know you are deep down inside?
It’s hard for the mind to accept the weight of all that responsibility because it means the only reason you feel like you’ve been held back in life or feel the way you do emotionally is because of you.
That’s an intense rollercoaster of emotion you must deal with if you go down that road.
Another issue you’ll have to contend with is the idea that you aren’t really who you think you are. The image you’ve propped up for yourself is a straw man meant to justify your thoughts and feelings.
On top of all this, you then have to contend with the fact that if you aren’t who you thought you were, then who are you?
Many live their lives as an amalgamation of their negative experiences because that defines them in their present circumstances, but that’s not who they truly are. In most cases, it’s who they made themselves to be in order to evade whatever responsibility they need to shoulder for their thoughts, words, and actions.
This is a heavy burden to bear, one the mind doesn’t want to accept willingly.
It can be painful, sad, frustrating, scary, and anxiety-ridden to think that the only reason you’re in the situation you are in is because of the choices you made. You and you alone.
I may not have had a choice in where I lived growing up, but I had a choice in how I handled my mind regarding my situation.
Perhaps I didn’t have much say in my upbringing, but I did have the ability to choose how to move forward from it.
Situations at work may have been out of my control and not the most pleasant to deal with, but my choices in handling the situation were my own.
Yes, life can be unfair. It can be hard.
Life can be painful.
If you don’t integrate this idea into your system, your mind will continue to fight for the life you’ve built for yourself, even if it doesn’t serve you.
Because it’s easier to stay the same than it is to change.
Learn to Enjoy the Ride
I love this quote by Dickens,
“Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many — not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
– Charles Dickens
I was joking with my sister today about some of the poor decisions we’ve made in life, but when you get down to it, those decisions don’t compare to all the blessings we’ve experienced.
Even the simple act of joking with my sister is a great blessing. Similarly, meeting a friend for lunch and sharing life with them is a blessing. Holding your child or a loved one, watching a sunset, hiking a mountain trail, or swimming in the ocean are all tremendous blessings.
Driving your car to work, riding the bus, talking on the phone, being able to walk, run, and jump, lifting weights and eating food, watching TV, barbequing with your friends, making love, sleeping in a bed, and living in a home are all blessings. How many more are there? There are so many! The problem is that all these situations are often taken for granted.
You may not see them for what they are anymore. Instead, they’re often seen as just another to-do item on a list of many things to do.
These things, however, are what make life worth living.
Many of them may seem mundane after a time, but that’s because we stop living in the present with them.
In all actuality, they’re not mundane at all. They’re vibrant and full of life. We’re the ones who have become mundane because we’ve chosen to stop seeing the beauty in everything. Most things have become so normal and routine that they no longer take our breath away, but that’s simply because we’re not focused on the moment.
Our heads are somewhere else, thoughts swirling around about why a particular situation did or didn’t go our way, why this person said what they said, and on and on.
Many of these instances are sabotaged by constantly revisiting the past to define one’s present and future.
So, instead of enjoying what’s right in front of you, you conjure up the past to inform you of how you should feel and how you should act or respond, and in doing so, you replicate the cycle yet once again and wonder why the hamster wheel never seems to stop spinning.
Judging yourself won’t help the situation either. The first thing you need to understand is that to get out of this situation; you must stop clinging to the past.
If you don’t, you won’t be able to bring about change in your life. You will experience change, but it will be the change life forces on you whether you want to accept it or not.
How Do You Move Forward?
Start with these simple ideas:
“No amount of regretting can change the past, and no amount of worrying can change the future.”
– Roy T. Bennett
“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”
– Johnny Cash
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
– Buddha
First, you must realize that the past is past, and there’s no way to get it back. What happened happened! It doesn’t matter what you said or did; the choices you made cannot be changed.
Your only options are to either accept where you are now for what it is and take responsibility for your life or continue to judge yourself and others within the confines of the prison of your mind.
Option one may be a hard pill to swallow, but it’s what allows you to move forward with your life in a productive way because you’re no longer willing to blame yourself or anyone else for where you are today. Instead, you put yourself to the task of learning how to make yourself a better person, picking yourself up, and moving beyond what you find yourself clinging to.
You decide you are no longer a slave to your mind and past experiences. In doing so, you open up space that allows you to move forward with equanimity through whatever situations you happen to be navigating, which begins to allow peace and joy to fill your life.
As a result, life begins to express itself in ways you hadn’t noticed before. Such simple things as watching a bird hop here and there in a parking lot in search of food become a joyous occasion.
Instead of crushing the wolf spider you find in your house, you marvel at how wondrous a creature it is and find a way to move it outside to terrorize the garden.
You start to see things not as separate but as an extension of yourself.
It doesn’t mean you’re perfect or never experience bad days or difficult moments, but your overall experience becomes calmer and more serene.
You’ll still catch yourself acting out or reacting in ways that aren’t beneficial, but now you’re focused on catching yourself acting that way as often as possible because you know it disturbs the peace you’ve been working to cultivate.
The further you move into this experience, the more profound your love for life becomes. It doesn’t require you to work for it; you just have to notice it and be present with it.
No fighting. No striving. Just being.
Option two merely requires you to continue to judge yourself and others for everything wrong with your life. You’ll refuse to learn how to make yourself a better person. Instead of picking yourself up off the floor, you’ll try to find ways to sink deeper into it.
It also means you consciously choose to remain a prison of your mind, of your past, of the injustices that may have befallen you. Peace and joy will be there throughout various moments, but they’ll be fleeting and hard to find as you struggle to make sense of your situations.
Life won’t express itself because you’ll be too busy to notice. Too angry or anxiety-ridden, too depressed, too caught up in your trivialities being of utmost importance, and thus, it will pass you by.
When you see the bird in the parking lot, you’ll think it’s a pitiful creature, a nuisance, and “It better not shit on my car.”
As soon as you spot the wolf spider, you’ll find the closest object you can use to smash the life out of that pest and think, “How the hell are they still in my house?”
You’ll continue to see everything as separate; it’s you against the world and everyone in it, except for those closest to you, and even then, you might not be so sure about some of them.
It will mean that most days are bad, difficult moments are plentiful, and your overall experience is dread, frustration, endless toil, and an unbearably heavy burden.
You’ll continue to act and react in ways that aren’t beneficial without stopping to think about how you could make the situation better. You may try to handle yourself with more aplomb the next time, but since you don’t know what lasting peace is, what does it matter if you invite a little more chaos into your life?
The further you continue in this experience, the deeper your disdain for life becomes. You may even come to the point where you hate it, where all you want is for life to end because it requires so much of you. It’s constant work and energy, and you never have time to just be.
Always fighting. Always striving. Never being.
The Choice Is Yours
It’s interesting to write this because I’ve lived on both sides of the spectrum and everywhere in between, as I’m sure many people have, but I’ve felt the fullness of both scenarios previously described, and I 100% choose option one over option two. Especially now that I’ve had a chance to experience that first option again for the first time in a very long time.
It’s sad to think I lived in option two for so long, revisiting endless misery over and over because I didn’t know how to break out. I honestly didn’t know one of the most effective ways to break out was to take responsibility for everything that happened in my life, good and bad.
Now, the question is, which option would you prefer to live in the majority of the time? On one side of the coin, you have life; on the other, you have death. It’s light and dark, black and white.
It’s funny how you can’t have one without the other, but you can choose to live more fully in one than you do the other.
Choosing life means owning up to everything you’ve ever experienced, good and bad, and taking responsibility for your part in it. In some cases, maybe you had no choice; the situation happened, and you had no control over the outcome, but you do have control over how you choose to let it define you.
Moving into this place of responsibility can be a scary thing. It means you have to be willing to face your demons. You’ll also have to be brave enough to let go of the past and stop letting it define you.
In many cases, it may force you to make tough decisions about your life and who you are because if this current version of yourself isn’t serving you, if it’s leaving you depressed, resentful, bitter, angry, or whatever, then you’ll have to change, and that can be a difficult thing to do.
After all, if you are who you are, and you begin to remove some of those pieces of yourself that you thought were you, then who are you?
You may have tried doing this in the past and found it to be exhausting. It can be. It can be very exhausting. But what’s more exhausting, continuing to live the way you are now or working towards a better version of yourself?
If you choose to work on this, to develop yourself and move beyond the past you desperately cling to, you’ll begin to find peace and joy in your life. As mentioned above, Option One will start to reveal itself to you—maybe not immediately and instantaneously, but slowly and enticingly.
Remember, in most cases, there is a lot of reprogramming and healing to do.
Learning to find the present moment can be a powerful tool in assisting you on this journey. Understanding the concept of being right here, right now, as often as possible can tremendously impact your life.
Eckhart Tolle has a great book titled, “The Power of Now,” which discusses how staying present can help you release attachment to the past and reduce suffering. I suggest you check it out.
All in all, the decision is yours.
No one can make it for you.
Maybe you’re reading this and feel as if life doesn’t seem so bad; perhaps you think you have a pretty good life. Even so, consider how doing this work might make it even better because I’m willing to bet that no matter how good your life is, there’s something in there you still desperately cling to.
Either as a reminder of who you are or where you came from, but why not just let it go? Why hold onto it any longer? Is it really serving you to grasp hold of that situation, that person, that event? Maybe it’s time to release it if you find it doesn’t.
If this message resonates with you, please share it with your friends and family. If you want the world to change, it starts with you.
You can’t keep expecting everyone “out there” to change for you to begin experiencing change. You’ve got to reverse that sentiment. Work to change yourself so that you can begin to help change what’s “out there”.
I hope you have a great day. Thank you for reading.
Josiah
