Time is a quirky thing, isn’t it? All too often, we spend so much of our present fixated on the past or the future. Last week, I went to a casino. I spent money at the blackjack table. The amount doesn’t really matter. If today, I needed the money I spent at the casino, there is no amount of negotiating I can do to get that money back. The same is true of EVERY moment of our past. You cannot undo the moments of your past. Yet most of us (me included) will spend a great deal of time in discussion with our past. Many times, we label it regret. Familiar phrases include, “If only I had,” “Thing we be different now if,” and many other varieties.
Each one of these arguments with the past end the same way, we are where we are now. Fussing with the past does not change the present in any meaningful way. Similarly, the past cannot hurt our present. When we think about that happened in the past, even something painful, we experience new pain in the present based on how we think about the past event. It is not the past hurting us. For example, when I graduated from high school, the girl I dated at the time broke up with me shortly after graduation. Did it hurt at the time, absolutely. I was despondent for at least a few days. But today, the hurt of that event has no direct impact on me today. The only negative emotion I might experience today is in how I think about that event. I can choose to be sad today because of something that happened over 30 years ago, or I can look at that same event and think about how it opened the door to date the woman I would eventually marry (and to who I am happily married to today). The event itself has no power over me and nothing I can do will change the fact that she broke up with me.
And what of the future? Raise your hand if you have ever worried about something that might happen? Keep your hand up if when the thing happened, it was different than you expected? And in truth, did worrying about it have any impact on the event. Chances are the worry itself had no meaningful impact. Now, you may have done things that altered the event in some way, but the worry itself probably only succeeded in providing you with discomfort in the present. Worry, by itself, does not impact the future. I can spend hours worrying about something that might happen. The worry will not make it happen, nor will it prevent it from happening. When I was in college (any of the times I was in college…there were a few), I often worried about whether I would graduate…okay I only worried about that in undergraduate, because I was not very studious. The point to the story is this, the worry did not increase or decrease my likelihood of graduating. Spending more time studying, doing my homework, these are the things that impacted the likelihood of the event. The same can be said of job hunting. You can spend hours and hours worrying about whether you will get an interview, but none of that worrying will increase the chances of getting an interview. Spending time on interview prep, revising your resume, making connections with prospective employers, these are all things that will increase your chances of getting an interview.
Where does that leave us? You cannot change your past and the future is yet to be written. The only real control you have is the decisions you make in the present. Those decisions can be informed by the knowledge of your past and made in light of where you want to be in the future, but they are still made in the present. Energy spent regretting your past and worrying about your future is wasted and emotional discomfort you feel about the past or the future you are choosing to feel in your present. I am reminded of a song from one of my favorite musicals by Jon Larson, Rent. “There's only us, there's only this. Forget regret, or life is your's to miss. No other path, no other way. No day but today.”
Each of us only has now. The direction your life takes in the future depends 100% on what you do now. So what are you going to do?