By
Sometimes I wonder if I could start all over on a clean slate.
It’s like, you take a good look at your life and realize there are things you should not have done.
“That was bad. It was okay at the time. But I wish I could delete it from the history of my life altogether. I wish I knew better.”
Have you ever had similar thoughts?
Whether it was your fault or not, some events will come back to your mind to haunt you.
Many times it is a secret only you know. It may no longer have a physical (or “real”) consequence.
But because you’ve taken it up on yourself to be a person of integrity, you wish you didn’t do some things.
You wish they never happened.
Can we change the past?
Is it even possible to change something that has happened in the past?
It isn’t.
But depending on the impact of the consequence, occasionally we’ll feel like going back into the past to make sure it didn’t happen.
You wish you had a time machine.
Depending on the impact of what happened, thinking about it may have a serious impact on your current life and the decisions you make for your future.
Here’s what you can do about feeling like changing the past.
Forgive Yourself
It could be that you were young and naive.
You have to realize we do life with what was handed over to us. You can’t decide how much is handed to you.
You start with what was passed down. Information, financial status, knowledge, lifestyle, beliefs, culture and all.
That’s what you start with.
And those will decide the decisions you make at that time because it was what you had, it was all you knew.
So you should stop being too hard on yourself for taking actions based on what you had at the time.
Forgive yourself. Forgive those who wronged you and try to move on.
It’s not going to be easy. But you’ll never get where you should be if you don’t start the journey.
Start trying to forgive yourself now, to forgive others, and with time, you’ll get better.
Make Choices You Can Live With
I heard this first in a movie called 24. The Jack Bauer block burster of a movie.
In that season of the movie, Jack Bauer is a “former” agent of the Counter Terrorist Unit. He has a history of doing impossible things to defend his country.
At some point, he has had to work with an agent named Renee Walker.
Renee has seen Jack break the law and even hurt people to get information needed to save the people of the United States.
On one of those days, after witnessing some of the things Jack had to do, and now faced with the responsibility of doing similar things to save her country, a distressed agent Renee asked Jack an impossible question.
“Do you regret anything that you did today?”
(I won’t rewrite the whole thing but Jack’s response couldn’t be better.)
He said, “When you cross that line, it always starts off with a small step. Before you know it you’re running as fast as you can just to justify what you started in the first place.
“…I guess the only advice I can give you is, try to make choices that you can live with.”
That line blew me away.
The context here is slightly different but this is a priceless piece of advice that also works if you’re having trouble dealing with poor choices you made in the past.
You can’t change the past.
But what you can do from now on is make sure that every day of your life, you’ll make choices that you can live with.
Sometimes it takes regrets, heartbreaks, losses, for most people to realize, that moment of pleasure, those weeks of fun, should never have been.
We wanted to do what we thought was okay at the moment, but the consequences make you realize it shouldn’t have been in the first place.
It’s not only “bad” decisions we regret. There are times when what was good then is no longer good for us now.
We may have done it to please someone else. Now we regret it.
Now that you know better, before you do anything ask yourself, “When the dust settles, will I be able to live with what I’ve done?”
You know yourself. It may be okay for others. But will you be able to live with it?
Living your life making choices you can live with will give you a life free of regrets.
You can’t fix the past, but you can make up for it
Even when you can’t get into a time machine and undo the past completely, you can do things that completely erase the effects of what happened in the past.
There are events that can completely erase the feelings of the past.
Just as we find in the bible verse above, you can accomplish things that will make you forget those events of the past.
With time, you can make someone you hurt begin to feel different about you if you consistently live a different life for years.
This is life, nothing goes for nothing.
I mean, actions have consequences. No one is immune to that law.
So wait it out when you have to. It’s the price you have to pay at times.
Don’t expect the pain to go overnight. You can’t fix trauma overnight with positive thinking. It takes time.
Don’t expect someone you hurt to get over it because you bought them a house. That’s not how it works.
Some things, you have to wait positively till they subside.
Some people can’t wait. That’s why they drink to avoid it, smoke to avoid it, rope other people in to lessen the load.
But if you really want to get rid of the evil of the past, live a life that makes the future a place where thinking about the past won’t hurt you anymore.
We’ve seen Steve Jobs build a company after losing his job.
We’ve seen families forgive and heal.
We’ve seen massive success make past regret feel like nothing.
If you want to fix the past, make sure your future is the complete opposite.
Final Words
For many things in life, there will be consequences.
And for the bad events, the consequences will be there too no matter what.
Whether it was your fault or not.
And when it’s something that makes a mark on your life, it will take time for you to recover from it.
Whether it is physical, emotional, mental, healing takes time.
Getting rid of the consequences of the past takes time.
And the only way to completely get rid of it is to consistently do things that make your life better.
Every day you wake up, take responsibility, make up your mind, to make choices that you can live with.
Write it out and pin it to a wall if you have to.
Today, Make choices that you can live with.
