Do you wish you lived your life differently?
An evening drive up my favorite road to catch the rain that turned into snow for the first time during the fall season. It did not snow for weeks afterward.
The concept of living wishing you lived your life differently is interesting. If you had to live your life over again, would you live it differently? You know so much now, you feel like you could have done things so differently, but would you?
If you truly wish you lived your life differently, what excuses are you giving yourself to not start now? Wishing you lived your life differently puts a lot of emphasis on wishing for something you don’t have. Something that’s in the past that you can’t change. It’s okay to realize profound things from the past that can shape the decisions you make in the future, but wishing you can start over and make different choices is a waste of energy and time. You can’t make different choices from the past. You can only make different choices in the future. And as stuck as you might feel, you will always feel more stuck if you keep focusing on things you wish you could change in the past.
Let the lessons drive the change you want to see in the future. The only way we can grow is to reflect on the past, but it doesn’t mean we should exist there. It doesn’t mean we should try and wish we were there. We must reflect in order to grow, but it’s naive to think we can “make up” for what we did in the past. We can only make choices now that could influence how we want to see the future. Whether we end up there or not. We can learn from others and reference others for the choices we may want to make in the future. But it’s irresponsible of us to dwell, wishing we did things differently without accepting that the only choices we can make are now. Life isn’t about changing the past or making up for the past. Everything is changing, always, in unpredictable ways. And it always will. Learn to grow from those changes and that’s the best we can do. Make aligned choices moving forward but don’t give into this idea that you’ve lived your life incorrectly.
My point in this is to say, reflecting on the past to drive choices we make vs making choices now to make up for the past are two very different things. The first is growth focused, the latter is regret focused. The first comes with a deep acceptance, understanding, and compassion. The latter comes with blame, regret, and denial. The action forward may be similar, but the way we think about things matters.
-Madison