Are you living your life from where you are?

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Is your past past?

 

For most young children, there is little or no past. The child anticipates their future with peace, excitement, and a natural joy that comes from living in the moment.

 

But for most adults, the past is a reminder of guilt, of regret, of blame, of mistakes that we made, of unfulfilled dreams, of what we didn’t do and what others did to us. For most adults, the past is remembered as a minefield, keeping us constantly aware of what we must avoid in our present and in our future.

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An incomplete past means an unpromising future

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We remain incomplete and disempowered by our past. We treat our past as if somehow we could change it. The past is entirely past. Your past of one minute ago is as unalterable as the assassination of Julius Caesar twenty centuries ago. The only things you can alter about your past (and your present) are how you interpret it and what new insights you can learn from it that will empower you into your future.

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Find the gifts

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I once worked with a woman who experienced her divorce as a tragedy in which she blamed both herself and her ex-husband. Her experience tainted her everyday feelings about herself and also clouded the possibilities for her relationships with men.

 

I invited her to explore the questions, “What were the gifts of my divorce?” And “What gifts might I create out of my divorce?”

 

At first, she resisted the questions, saying, “There were no gifts in my divorce.” But slowly she began to discover gift after gift that came out of her divorce, gifts that she would in no way give up today, even in exchange for not having gone through the divorce!

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This power is expressed in the title of the book, "It's Never Too Late to Have a Happy Childhood" by Gail Sheehy.

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Create your life as if you're always starting fresh

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We have only the present, now and now and now. We can ask of ourselves only what can we do now.

 

The good news is that what we can do now, both in action and in interpretation, can completely alter both our experience of the past and our experience for the future, thereby altering our experience of now!

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The doors of your future will open simply by closing the doors of your past

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Is your past past?

 

Do you anticipate your future so that you are empowered by your past rather than disempowered by your past? What aspects of your past do you experience as bad or damaging?

 

What gifts might you discover or create out of these experiences?

 

What new interpretations might you explore that would empower you? Use your courage and creativity to live in the present.