The Passed Past
Sometimes I look back and do not recognise the person I was.
One tap from our fingers and we can see You deleted this message in front of our eyes, and every time we do this, we are thankful for this feature’s existence. Another tap from our fingers and we can delete a post on social media. Another tap and a contact is deleted. One tap and we can block pestering people. One more tap and boom, we can delete our entire social media accounts. All of this is giving us the apparent impression of power in and control over our lives because unfortunately, all of this is possible only in the virtual world. In the real world we pay huge dividends for every decision we ever make.
When we were kids, we were taught writing with pencils, and we had the opportunity to erase our mistakes. Thanks to the era of technological rapidity and breakthrough innovations, we can do still the same in our lives, I mean as long as it’s about posts, contact numbers and texts. (And when you come to think of it, most of our social life is composed of these only nowadays). In the real wide world however, the truth is different, you do not get a magical eraser to save you from your own self-loathing that you encounter when you think about what better decisions you could have made. Nevertheless, to be able to contemplate about our past mistakes is a blessing in disguise as it presents before us everything we do not want to be, which in my humble opinion is more important than everything that we want to be.
The harsh truth however is that you do not have the magical power to change the past. Thankfully, nobody in the world has this sort of power. Overthinking about the past, dwelling into its memories, fantasising about the alternatives of the past incidents, is only the mind’s way of losing focus on the present. The reality is that there is nothing that can be changed from our past but our present can definitely be changed a lot more with enough grit for a better future. Nobody in this overly populated Universe can change their past but only the present. Your power lies in fixing the future, using your present and not the past.
Sometimes, I look back and do not recognise the person I was. Looking back on the person I was years, months or even days back, I cannot find many similarities between that person and the present self. Weird right? The exes we have dated, the people we have almost-dated, the people who have meant so much only to turn into complete weirdos, the ideals we have held, the things we have worried so much about a lot in the past, the dreams that have turned into utter fiascos are only reminders of the changes in us.
We are all making mistakes. Some of us are dwelling into them, others are simply learning from them and moving on. To think that person X is highly successful and has not made any mistakes in life is a highly erroneous thought. Today, if I look back at the person I was ten years ago, or five years ago, or even a year ago, I do not recognise the person I was and this has been the greatest blessing in my life. I have evolved with every experience. I used to believe that life was a fairy tale unless I realised it isn’t the least. Then, I used to believe that if I work hard in a particular domain, success would come rushing to me until I realised that there are certain things beyond our control and though we must pray for the best, we must also prepare for the worst. Then, I thought that we must be willing to let go a lot of things in life if we wish to be at peace with ourselves. Now, I have reached the point where I think that life is all about knowing the balance between holding on and letting go, working and relaxing, positives and negatives, courage and cowardice. Matthew Mcconaughey’s best actor Academy Award’s winning speech is my favourite speech in the Oscars. I would not state it here in its entirety but tell you that he mentioned three things that he needs each day; someone to look upto, something to look forward to, and someone to chase. The last one he said, the someone he is always chasing is the person he would be in ten years. He said that his hero is the person he himself would be in ten years. This sums up everything I have been trying to emphasise here, that while we encounter novel experiences, novel people, novel places, we must make sure that we use every opportunity to make us a better person in ten years from now, that is what we must chase. So that when we look back at our own past, we are reminded of learnings from each regret, gratitude for every opportunity we took for granted, morals from our mistakes. Most importantly, I hope we are perennially on the road to improvement, so that our hero is the person we become in ten years from now.
The past on its own accord has the power to make us better human beings, if only we are brave enough to learn from it.
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