" M I S T A K E S
A R E  P A R T
O F  M Y
L A N D S C A P E ."
Eric Maisel

"I  W I L L  L E A R N
T O  C H O O S E
E F F O R T L E S S L Y
A N D
E F F E C T I V E L Y,
W I T H O U T  A  L O T
O F  P A I N
A N D  W A S T E D
M O T I O N ."
Eric Maisel

I think that, in general, we cannot have the best in the future if we will not let go of the worst from the past. We are where we are today because of all of our past experiences and what we learned from them. We can spend time regretting what we see as our past mistakes or update those experiences by assigning that new perspective to them.

A colleague, Rick Jackson, coined the phrase "fear of the past". I interpret it to mean that as soon as things start going well, we haunt ourselves with negative experiences from the past. The good will not last, it is only temporary, whereas we assign a more permanent status to what is painful, which will surely rise again. Fear of the past can become a restrictive, even immobilizing, fear of the future. We go through life looking over our shoulder, rather than fully enjoying what is coming into view in front of us.

Or we can be nostalgic, escaping to pleasurable experiences of the past as a way to avoid the reality of life as being a mixture of pleasure and pain. Nostalgia is remembering the pleasure and forgetting the pain. It is an obstacle to participation in any new opportunity that may have an element of pain associated with it, despite its positive or pleasurable benefits to our personal learning. It is another way of looking back rather than forward.

And new personal learning itself can bring more pain than pleasure, if we are unwilling to let go of the past. New learning can perpetuate regret and self-criticism for not knowing better sooner and avoiding our past errors. It is a pattern of thinking that easily leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy that pain will surely revisit us, and may be a form of penance. So best to focus on the learning afforded by our experiences and apply it "down the road" in making different choices rather than looking backward to further lament choices long since made.

Given that the past is a good predictor of the future (Dr. Phil McGraw), shifting our focus forward is, ironically, a way of creating a new, more recent past of making better decisions as we travel down the road. An occasional glance into the rear view mirror will serve as a positive reminder of where we have just been as we look forward to where we are going.