In most of our waking moments we’re critical, whether consciously or subconsciously, of something relating to our past. We criticise ourselves for past choices, made or unmade. And this self-judgement is so slippery and insidious, it’s so intimately intertwined with our experience of life that it feels inseparable from it.
Of course, we’ll be full of blame and guilt for things we can’t change, all the while we expect the very person we’re beating up to create the great future we’re envisioning. It’s hardly a surprise that often it doesn’t work. What a shocker that putting yourself down for things you can’t change isn’t producing the life you want.
It is both cliched and ridiculous that we need to remind ourselves that the past is in the past. And that it’s just a story, and as studies on our recollection of past events demonstrate, a rather questionable and highly subjective one.
It’s our desire to learn from the past that drives us to examine it. But there’s a clash here, too, because we learn to learn in order to get things right. That’s how our education system is largely structured: we learn in order to get the right answers and if we don’t, we learn to learn better so we don’t fail next time.
And so it seems that the benefit of learning is not in indulging our curiosities, but in avoiding mistakes. Essentially, we learn in order to avoid pain. And with our minds thus primed, it’s hardly a surprise that we spend out present moments searching our past for failures to learn from in order to prevent them from recurring. But the process we use to prevent mistakes is the same process that taught us on the first place that we’re not allowed to make them.
And more importantly, the reason we’re doing all of this is to create a good future. And the only place from which we can create a good future is the present moment. And yet, here we are, overwhelmed with thoughts of guilt, and shame, and remorse for our past, trying to create a good future.
The real benefit of learning from painful past experiences is not in figuring out how to prevent them but in understanding why they were painful on the first place. And the real opportunity when it comes to our past is not to avoid it, but to choose it all, just as it is.