Skip to main content

The time machine

How much time do we spend on regret?  Is there an appropriate amount of reflection or is it harmful at any rate?  No one can truly travel back no matter how hard we might try.  Do you try to repair your past or do you just take the lessons that you can from it and run for your life?  I've spent an enormous amount of time in the last few weeks wondering what I would do differently if I could only go back. 
Mid life crisis?  Sure, it's a possibility.
If someone from your past comes back into your life from afar, do you embrace it?  Or do you run like hell and leave it all behind where it has remained for so many years?  Do you use that opportunity for closure and then just let life happen?  In my thinking, I have come up with, what I hope would be, five helpful rules for dealing with this issue.

#1-  Accept any and all apologies.  Always be humble.  Likely, the person apologizing needs to apologize to you more that you need the apology.  Accepting apologies doesn't equal giving in.

#2-  Don't spend excessive amounts of time living there (in the past).  It isn't beneficial to ignore the people in the present.  These people are here, right now, and for a good reason.

#3-  Don't be fooled into thinking that you can pick up exactly where you have left off.  The human mind and heart just simply don't operate that way as much as we would love for them to do so.  Can something wonderful happen??  Of course it can!! Just be aware that it may not.

#4-  Only travel back if you are certain of your present.

#5-  The grass will ALWAYS be greener on the other side, so be careful of the grounds that you travel back to.

  I will spend more time working on contentment.  After all, what exactly is it that I think I don't have?? :)

Comments

  1. Regret and guilt are both things I hang on to for far too long. Yes, there are lessons to be learnt from both - but whipping myself with them is not productive. Some great thoughts here - thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You are a very wise young lady!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I agree, you are wise. The pain can go away but the scars remains just like the holes that the nails left in the wood even though the nails have been removed.The holes remains.
    Lessons are learned but we move on with more cautions for good reasons.

    Hugs,
    JB

    ReplyDelete
  4. I was a middle school teacher. I see many former students. Many feel they have to make a statement about their behavior. The statement is not necessary at all in my view. One guy even apologized for his buddies as well. So don't beat yourself up. The ideas seem worse in your head than anybody else's.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Definitely a wise post! Someone contacted me last year to apologize ~ which was shocking because I hadn't seen or heard from him in over forty years. Accepting his apology, even though I thought I should be the one to apologize, lifted a heavy load from my shoulders. Each of your points rang so true, but especially #4! I am very grateful for my present.

    ReplyDelete
  6. So true true true!!! Needed to hear this today!!!

    ReplyDelete
  7. It is so tempting to look back and scrutinise how we have lived our lives and wonder if we made the wrong decisions at crucial points - and how different our lives would have been if the other road was travelled. We will never know. I am a believer in fate and feel that events all through your life are linked by an invisible thread. We are where we are supposed to be.

    ReplyDelete
  8. "The past can be a good place to visit, but a terrible place to stay". This quote has always spoken loud to me because I believe it. The past is the past for a reason, we can never move forward whilst looking backwards. Regret is a natural human emotion, but one of the most destructive ones. If contentment is what you seek, then let any feelings of regret go. Only then will you be truly content :)

    ReplyDelete
  9. Sounds like all good advice to me.

    ReplyDelete
  10. I agree 100% with everything you've writting down here. So true! I often wonder, why we all tend to live in the past even if we're happy in the present. Letting go of the past, most of all forgiving ourselves and moving on is one of the hardest things to do yet so rewarding. If there is an opportunity for closure I will always take it but make sure to leave the past in the past once and for all after I got closure. Hope you're doing well. I was so happy to see that you had posted again! :)

    ReplyDelete
  11. Excellent post. Thank you so much for sharing.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Single Parenthood; Friend or Foe?

This is my new journey in blogging.  As is already obvious in the title, I am a single mother of two of the most fabulous children that I know (and I don't say that because they are mine), they truly are great kids.  I not only love my children, I actually LIKE the people that they are.  I know that we all love our children deeply and those are the rules of the universe, but do we LIKE them? I started my journey into single motherhood about seven years ago.  It seems that I stumbled into the journey while blaming the seven year itch of my lovely ex husband....but now...now it seems that I am stumbling into a seven year itch myself.  Not the typical seven year itch where you look for attention from others, but the kind where you almost want to run from it.  I used to be the most social of creatures, but in recent months, I seem to want to be a recluse.  It's safer in that environment. My daughter is now 13, yes...stumbling into womanhood the same way that we all had to, "

My son has a hero.....

My son has a hero... His name is John Calipari, coach of the University of Kentucky Wildcats, a team that my son watches faithfully.  A team that is the root of Jake's hours of basketball time in our driveway every single night and a team that has given Jake a dream.  It all started a few weeks ago when I saw a posting on Facebook that Coach Cal would be doing a book signing in the next town about an hour and a half away.  I obviously started planning right at that exact second.  Jake, my son, has been feverishly planning what he was going to say to Coach Cal, but last night didn't seem very promising at first.  When we arrived at the book signing, Coach Cal had made an announcement that he was tired and that it had been a long few weeks.  He informed the audience that this would go extremely fast, about three seconds per person, long enough for the camera girl to flash a picture.  You were to step a few feet behind him and smile for your once in a lifetime photo with you

Single moms only lose it over ricotta cheese

People often ask me "How do you do it with two kids and a career all by yourself"? My response? I just do it!! It's not even that hard!! We do what we have to do, especially when little people are involved, but I have to tell you that it's occurred to me recently that it's the little things that send me flying over the deep end. Any big, huge life event, I can tackle with ease. I was standing in the kitchen making a lasagna for a coworker that had broken her leg. I thought that I would make her and her family a dinner and dessert to ease some of her stress. I make the salad, I make the dessert and then I proceed to gather the ingredients for the Alfredo lasagna. I realize that I had forgotten to purchase the ricotta cheese in between picking up kids from school and an academic team practice. What do you think happened? Did I get back into the car and go to the store that's only five minutes down the street?? No. I had a complete meltdown right there in the kit