IS IT HEALTHY TO LIVE WITHOUT REGRETS?
|| Written on Monday 17th July 2023
“What has gone has gone. It’s behind you. You cannot change the past, forget it. All that matters where you’re heading, not where you’ve come from.”
We’ve all heard sentiments of this nature, advising us to leave the past in the past. In today’s session, the speaker appears to be directing the words at me initially and talks about leaving the burden of the past behind.
But I can’t help but wonder how many of us can really and truly do that. Someone once used the metaphor that we drive forward by looking forward and not by looking in the rear view mirror. But we do check that mirror from time to time. Is it even possible to live life without regrets about certain aspects from our past?
Some might suggest that by deleting past life issues from our memory is unhealthy in that it shows an arrogance or forgetfulness for those past wrong decisions. I don’t think I’ve been too bad a person in the past. Yes I’ve made mistakes, haven’t we all. I regret some of the choices I made as a teenager. I do hang onto some of the mistakes I made, but I don’t think they play much part in my life today, only that I have become wiser from them.
I worry that, pretending the past didn’t happen, is an unhealthy approach and a delusional approach that fools nobody, not even yourself. Without the past, I would not be who I am now. That’s the same for all of us. That said, I do understand this speaker today.