Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we move on from our past and are constantly trying to change and better ourselves. In the last couple of months, my life has made many twists and turns that I never expected. Change is inevitable. Change can be scary because we can never be sure about what direction our life will go in. But sometimes we’re stuck waiting for a change in our lives because we feel stagnant in the present. We see our lives as a timeline and we’re constantly looking ahead for something better. Even our actions in the present are motivated by our desires for the future. We wait every year for the ball to drop so we can start over and leave our past behind. But are we ever really able to leave our past in the dust? Or the more important question, why do we try to?
January has finally come to an end and I’m sure we all felt that it lasted too long. But let’s rewind to the beginning of the month. The excitement as we gathered around our TV’s and counted down, waiting for the ball to drop. A sign of a new start, a time to reinvent ourselves. We promised to start working out, eat healthier, and abandon toxic behaviors but after a couple weeks, we find ourselves exactly as we once were. Why do we feel that in order to better ourselves, we must completely abandon who we used to be?
Our past has shaped us into who we are now. Maybe there are parts of our past that we aren’t proud of or that we’d like to forget but we can’t erase the decisions we’ve made and the effects that they’ve had. Every action, reaction and decision we’ve made has led us up to this point in our lives. And if you aren’t satisfied with how your life is now, the answer isn’t to ignore the past but instead learn from it. As much as some of us would like to, we can’t just become blank canvases at the start of every year but what we can do is continue to paint ourselves into the person we want to be.