LEARNING FROM OUR MISTAKES

As we grow older, there are times, probably too, too many, when we reflect back on the mistakes we made, we say to ourselves, “If I only knew then what I know now”. But by now, of course, it is too late to undo the mistakes, the wrongs, the foolish decisions we made back then. We have had to live with the consequences whatever those consequences have been. We had no choice. We couldn’t undo what we did.

We move on in life for that is how life is. To be sure there are times when we get stuck in the present as the present moves into the future and becomes the past. Something happened and we can’t seem to move on. Whether that something was of our own making or because it was something that happened to us, we got stuck. And we stayed stuck until somehow in some way we were able to move on.

Hopefully, when we finally did move on, we learned from whatever it was that caused us to get stuck in the first place. If we did not learn, we were and still are prone to get stuck again when something of the same sort happens again. And it will. Mistakes, wrongs done to or by us, foolish decisions, somehow never seem to vanish from our lives. They rise up to bite us every now and then. Such is life!

The good part is that as we grow older, these events become less as less. We have learned from the past. We move on and continue to do so, but we move on not so much looking over our shoulders for something bad to happen, but from the perspective of having learned from the past. A wise person once observed that life is lived forward but understood backward.

Isn’t that the truth?! (Double punctuation mark) We both realize that we have learned from the past on the one hand and are surprised to realize how much we did learn. Not only that, when reflecting back on those unfortunate incidents in the past, we often have to admit that, as bad as they might have been, as traumatic and painful they were, we are glad they happened because they led us to where we are today and we are thankful for where we are.

You see, if the bad had not happened, our life would have turned out differently and we have no idea what that life would have become. We may think it would have been better, but that is a moot point. Our life now is the result of everything in our life that has led us to where we are right now. We only understand where we are now when we look back on from where we came.

The blessing is that we have come this far because we have learned from the past, the good and the bad. And we will continue to be blessed in spite of the mistakes and foolish decisions and the bad that happens and which, given human nature we cannot avoid, if we continue to look forward, always learning from those backward glances.