tomorrow

“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.” [Oscar Wilde]

But you can discover richness if you are willing to learn from it.

As we continue to focus on how looking back well can help us move forwards successfully, the next aspect i want to touch on is learning. We may not be able to change the past, but we can definitely learn from it to help change the future trajectory we might currently be on.

“Study the past if you would define the future.” [Confucius]

How do we learn from the past? Well, creating opportunities to reflect can be a good one. When tbV and i were finished out time at the Simple Way we took a few opportunities to sit together at a restaurant with a bunch of pieces of paper with different headings on them – What were some of the things we learnt these last 19 months? Who are the people we are going to miss? What were some of the disappointments? What are some of the moment we want to celebrate? What were our highs and lows?

This can be such a helpful thing to do when finishing off one season of life and heading into the next. By taking time to name and focus on good and bad things that happened, you can help put yourself into a place where you can maximise the good and avoid the bad in the future. Questions like ‘How could I have handled that relationship better?’ or ‘What might have been a better use of my time in this area? can really set us up well to be able to create better rhythms and habits as we move into a new context.

It is a good exercise to do by yourself but possibly even a better one to do with someone else as they can help identify blind spots if you create space for them to speak honestly [and lovingly] to you.

So maybe you are about to finish school or study. Maybe there is a new job on the horizon or you are about to physically move to a new place. Maybe you children are about to leave school or home. Perhaps you recently ended a dating relationship with someone or had a friendship end really badly. Would it maybe help to set aside some time and reflect on the past with the purpose in mind of setting yourself up well for the future.

It might even be something you want to do at the end of a year. Instead of the traditional ‘Write overambitious New Year’s Resolutions and try and keep them for about a week’ practice, how about scheduling a time [with your spouse if you are married or a group of friends, make a weekend trip of it] to sit down and look back at the last year and focus on both highlights and low lights and do what you can to set yourself up better for the coming year.

This is one way we can benefit from looking backwards which can really have such a huge positive impact on how we live forwards…

“The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.” [Harry S. Truman]

[To continue to the next important and potentially life-transforming part on Forgiving, click here]