Today was a pretty uneventful day for me. I was pretty much alone in my house all day today with absolutely nothing to do, yet I felt like today I did a lot more thinking than any other day. And I caught myself going into a bunch of "what if" scenarios.
I recently got into a pretty bad car accident a few days ago. Luckily no one was seriously injured and the worst thing that may come out of this accident is I may lose my car due to it being totaled. I thought I would be able to move on from that experience and learn from my mistakes yet I caught myself today thinking "what if I had seen that car earlier and stopped sooner?" This eventually lead into me wondering "what if..." for almost every major landmark event in my life. Just thinking about what my life would be like had I taken a different route at each of these moments made me curious what I would be like today. One thing that I was thinking about a lot today was what I would be like had I not staffed SPOP last summer. Would I discovered my passion for dancing? Would I still have met the people I met through SPOP? Would I have the same outlook about life? There are many more questions that were raised but as I was thinking about that I realize I was venturing down a path that I shouldn't explore. All this "what if..." was making me look at my past and either regret past decisions/actions or wonder had I made the correct decision at that moment. I was forcing myself to start thinking backwards instead of forward.
I'm not saying that thinking about the past is a terrible thing to do, but if we are not careful we will begin to dwell on the past which is pretty much what I began to do. Yes, I do wish I could create a time machine and go back and prevent/fix all of my experiences that I would label as bad experiences. Yet, if I was to fix those things where would I learn the lessons those experiences provided? There are so many things in life that cannot be taught and must be experienced first hand. Living in the past would get me nowhere because all I would be doing is moping around complaining about things I could of done differently. It would simply ruin my future. Life is best experience without any regrets, so I guess it's best to accept everything that happened, soak in the lessons and keep moving forward without looking back.
Carpe Diem.
