“It is not things that upset us, but our judgements about those things.” — Epictitus
We have a unique obsession with the past. Don’t we all?
The ‘gone episodes of life‘, both Good and Bad.
Surprisingly, The Bad Ones tend to stick with us for a longer period of time. And, in worst cases even leading us to chronic depression or nihilism, even suicides.
We also have list of vocabularies to describe these things of the past — we call them Events. Moments. Memories, or ‘Stories’ and ‘Snaps’ created over our beloved social media bubble.
But, most of all, we all have that persistent, whispering, irritating, excruciating and looping ‘Voice’ in our head which keeps on poking and scratching and tingling and pinching at the specific events of those bygone days.
Days we will never, ever re-live.
Moments, we can never go back to and redo shits.
Memories, we so deliberately choose to get stuck onto, loop over and over only to accept at the end — that it’s completely out of our hands.
Brain-vomits like:
I had the worst day of my life.
That boy cheated on me; broke my trust and left me alone to suffer — destroying my life altogether.
That last office I worked at was a total garbage and the acquaintances! — I don’t even want to talk about them. It was an utter waste of time.
My last boss really took a great deal of advantage out of my loyalty and honestly. What a piece of jerk!
Things like :- Oh! I should have done this. I should’ve not done that.
Wishful chatters like: I wish things had turned out this way or that way or easy way or my way!
Holy Fish!
You see, there’s just no limit to our wild imagination of carefully nitpicking our past craps or state of affairs — that we think didn’t go well or go as we expected.
Consequently, and unwillingly having ourselves dragged into a good, shitty, deep spiral road-trip down the rabbit hole of despair, of doubts, of restlessness, of utter pain and fucked questions! Eventually, turning us Pro at crying, whining, complaining, blaming and worst — an acting victim! With of course a collateral damage of having to carry an infested skull full of resentments and dissatisfaction.
Holy Fish!
Well, antidote?
Please, on’t beat yourself up for things beyond this moment, beyond your control and more importantly don’t be a caged bird! (I hope you get the metaphor)
Rather, acknowledge the devil — which are your own thoughts and decisively turn introspective by meditating over meaningful questions (metaphorically speaking) instead of subscribing to subjective, non-sensical, baseless, one-sided monkey chatter. (Trust me, I’m guilty of this myself.)
Yes — Simple, profound, weighty questions like
- Could it have been worst?
- What’s the lesson I could learn in the situation?
- What’s the path forward from here?
- Where do I see myself 72 hours from now …. 3 months from now, a year from now, 2 years from now?
can save your day!
Namaste.