Last update: January 08, 2015
How many times have you heard this phrase? It is sung with enthusiasm in songs full of passion, and in many films the protagonist and her suitor try to convince themselves that the past is past, nothing more.
But that's a lot easier said than done: “The past is past”… Sure. But how much have we left in the past to keep moving forward? We are, by nature, insistent. If someone abandons us, we can't help but ask ourselves what went wrong in the relationship, and when nostalgia invades us we want to reconstruct that moment step by step, and then let ourselves be carried away again by a thousand useless considerations.
And if we are the ones who leave someone behind, we keep asking ourselves if we did well, and "how would it go if ...". It is an eternal return to the past and, even if we don't want to acknowledge it, we all do. When we have made a mistake and we regret it, when we have been hurt and we feel hurt, we constantly go back to the past, to regret how things went when there is now nothing more to be done. And we go back to the past to complain about our fate, as if there weren't a thousand other better things that have yet to happen in the present and in the future.
We cannot live in the past, for sure they will have told you many times. We can only try to make up for our mistakes, overcome our disappointments and move on. There is no time machine, which one day will bring us back to the moments when we were happy with someone we have lost or which will lead us to recover the pieces of our heart or which will allow us to correct bad decisions made in the past ... it's just one thing we can do.
I've been thinking about it for a long time. Years ago, when something like the end of a relationship happened to me, I spent a lot of time building castles in the air. I imagined a movie where things would settle, for example when I was the one who made a mistake… On the other hand, to err is human. I wasted my energy thinking about things that would never happen, and so life went on while I remained focused on things that I couldn't do anything about now.
We must turn the page, to move on. The best thing we can do is think better before making a decision, take risks, but think that then we could suffer the consequences, do what we really want. After all, this is what hurts: regretting not having tried is always worse than acknowledging that you have made a mistake. Because there is no doubt about the latter: we made a mistake, we recognize it and move on. But when we do nothing, we will forever ask ourselves "What would have happened if I had tried?".
Do what we have to do and fit the pieces of the past, also experience the phases of denial, anger and acceptance: they are healthy and normal. When we are able to accept things, we are willing to move forward, because we have understood what happened and we have overcome it.
The past is only gone when we really leave it behind. Let's not fool ourselves by saying that it is when in reality we are continuing to relive it every day. And with the speed at which we live today, the pages of the calendar steal days from us without us even realizing it ... And so why waste energy pouring it out on a time, on people, on things that will not return? There will come other things, people and another new time.
I like to think that in the past I have made many mistakes, but that I have learned from each of them and that I have moved on. There are things that we barely remember and others that will always remain with us, but which are no longer toxic or negative. They cannot hurt or worry us, only serve us as an experience.
Everything else has passed, and has now been forgotten.
