Making Peace With Your Past
We want to be empowered by our past. The past no longer exists, and can reframe it, because the past is gone. The past we remember is just our version of the past. If you talk to four people from high school, each one of them will have a different recollection of the events that happened there, because the past is just our perception. We can change our version of the past, so that it empowers us. We’re making it up anyway. Let’s make up something that empowers us.
Zig Ziglar says, “Failure is an event. It is not a person. Yesterday really did end last night. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” I love that quote. My mamaw had a magnet on her refrigerator that said, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” It doesn’t matter what your regrets are, except for the extent that you can learn from them and make it right today. It’s time to move forward and start living a life where we don’t have those regrets.
We make up meanings and generalizations of what happened. We guess at what people said and we are reinterpreting what they could have meant, what we meant, thought, and said, what you thought the impact was. We need to drop the story altogether. If we want to keep a story, let’s keep one that makes us feel good.