There are No Mistakes to Go Back and Fix
Do you ever wish you could go back in time and fix the major mistakes of your life? Now what if I told you that there are no mistakes in life, so there is nothing to go back and fix? The more time we spend telling ourselves that certain experiences were mistakes, then we are missing the big picture of living. Every experience benefits us, even if we wish we had not experienced it later. There is never a need to live with regret about what did not happen or what you think could have happened if you had lived your life differently.
The events of your life were right--they were tailor made for you to learn and grow from them. We are always in the right place, right time and doing the right thing, even if there is difficulty and pain involved. The difficulty is helping us to grow if we can see the value and usefulness of every experience. As long as you are telling yourself that you did something wrong, then you cannot focus on finding out how exactly you benefited from the situation. We have to make peace with how our lives have turned out and move away from the past. The past is what it is. Wishing we could undo parts of our past will not really change anything, so why waste our present moments with thoughts of regret.
We fall too easily in the mental trap of telling ourselves that we would be perfectly happy right now, if our lives had worked out differently. We would be happier if we had gotten that divorce ten years ago. We would be happier if we had taken better physical care of ourselves and not had to deal with certain medical crises. We would be happier now if we had learned how to stand up for ourselves decades ago. We would be richer and happier if we had invested our money in higher yield investments years ago. Our lives would be perfect if we had not racked up huge amounts of debt or developed an addiction problem years ago. We believe that we would be happier if we had stayed in college instead of dropping out to work. We would be rich now only if we had made that investment years ago, but we were too afraid to take the financial risk. What is it that you regret in your life? As long as we are wishing that we had lived the past in every perfect way, we cannot see the lessons within all those experiences. We have to live and experience life to discover exactly how we want to live and what we want from life.
When are we going to stop blaming ourselves and other people for the life we have right now? Undoing the past will not change our lives today. We did the best we could do in the past. Those past experiences have shaped us and added a deeper, richer meaning to our lives. We were never victims of our experiences or circumstances. We are always victorious in life, even when we are at our lowest moments. Life is always giving opportunities to us that will help us to grow wiser and stronger. Our most powerful growth can come from our greatest personal challenges and difficulties. We might not have been emotionally ready to make the changes or take the opportunities that we now believe would have been right or better for us previously. If we are judging our past based on who we are today and what we know today, then our past will always appear to be a useless series of mistakes and missed opportunities.
Let go of this idea that you have past mistakes that you wish you could fix. You were right where you needed to be and doing what you needed to do, even during the difficult times. You needed those experiences to grow into the person that you are today. As long as you are wishing that the past was different, then you cannot see the gifts of the past. Choose to find the deeper meaning or beneficial lesson from your past instead of judging the past as wrong. When you stop judging your life as a series of mistakes, you will discover that your life has been a series of powerful lessons unfolding to help you to become a better person. If you want to be a better person, then start finding the lessons and stop defining certain parts of your past as mistakes.
Remember that we cannot live a perfect life. The pleasant and not-so pleasant experiences are a natural part of life. If we are always seeking to experience only the pleasant and desiring to completely avoid the unpleasant, then we are setting ourselves up for frustration and disappointment. We simply cannot have one without the other. Let go of the regret and look back over your life experiences with appreciation that you survived them.
Copyright©2010 Jeannine Robinson All Rights Reserved
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