“Beginning today, I will create a new future by creating a new me. No longer will I dwell in a pit of despair, moaning over squandered time and lost opportunity. I can do nothing about the past. My future is immediate. I will grasp it in both hands and carry it with running feet. When I am faced with the choice of doing nothing or doing something, I will always choose to act! I seize this moment. I choose now.”
Andy Andrews
Beyond the Quote (196/365)
One of the best ways to build a better lifestyle is to focus less on trying to break bad habits and to focus more on building new, better habits. One of the best ways to feel better when you’re hurt is to focus less on analyzing the pain and to focus more on doing what heals you. One of the best ways to overcome hate is to focus less on the hate and to focus more on love. This is all to say, one of the best ways to move on from a rough past is to focus on building a better future.
Once an event or situation has entered your mind as a memory, it’s over and done with. There’s no changing the nature of the event or situation itself. It’s in the past. You can, however, change your understanding, perspective, or interpretation of the event or situation, but that marks the full extent of your abilities to change what has already happened. So, once you’ve done that why dwell there?
Once you have taken the appropriate amount of time to understand your past, have seen things from the best perspective you could manage, and have interpreted those past words and actions from a standpoint of compassion, it’s time to move on. Dwelling doesn’t help. Dwelling implies a kind of lingering in what’s painful. Why do that to yourself?
And it’s not even like dwelling lets you sit in the same intensity of pain the whole time. Dwelling makes things worse because it moves what could be a potential “better future” to your already “rough past” and causes a sort of compounding effect in what’s rough. It literally steals away more of your life and keeps you locked in that sort of sad, aimless, lingering state. And ain’t nobody got time for that! Not you. Not me. Not any of us. There’s too much amazing potential to live for, work for, and realize.
So, when you decide it’s time to improve your lifestyle, heal from your pain, or move from hate to love, spend less time dwelling on where you are and focus more on building the new. If you think about a city that’s in ruins, what would be more motivating to those in the city: dwelling on the ruins and leveling the entire city? Or finding ways to start constructing new buildings in the midst of the ruins? The latter, of course.
Sure, you need to tear down some of the buildings to make room for the new—but, you don’t level the whole city all at once! You focus on building the new in thoughtful, specific locations so that life can continue and you proceed to do that until the whole city has been reconstructed and renovated. And so is true with your life.
Don’t try to break all of your bad habits all at once. Don’t try to confront all of your hurt all at once. Don’t soak in all of the hate from your past all at once. Be thoughtful and focus on rebuilding in specific locations from throughout your past. Let the process of rebuilding motivate you and ride that momentum into other, specific locations of your life from there. Progress begets progress. Stagnation begets stagnation. Keep moving forward and stop dwelling on that which is locked into history. It’s time to construct something new. The only question is, where to start?
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Written by Matt Hogan
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