Time is a fickle thing. There are moments when we think and/or wish it’ll last forever, or that it’ll go quickly. It never seems to be on our side. It’s so wibbly wobbly.
Yet time is something we can use to reflect. What happened already, to look back fondly on the good memories you made that day. Or in other cases, remembering something that gives you nothing but sadness. It can be anything: a failed relationship, something you could have prevented, etc. The sting of pain from those moments are heart wrenching at the time. Yet as some time passes, they become easier to cope with. But that hardly means you’ve forgotten. Those moments stay in your memories, and like it or not, they start influencing your life; the doubt starts to win over the hope every time.
That’s also the beauty of time. A lot of us seem to forget the very fundamentality of time: without the past, there can be no present, and no present, no future. No matter how much we try to convince ourselves, there are moments and things we wish we could go back and fix. But if we never made those mistakes, we never would have learned. With those lessons, we become wiser for the future and be better people for it. Yes, it might be better if we could back and change it, but it’s a paradox because the whole reason we want to go back is because we learned the lesson and want to be better. Unfortunately, life is not an RPG game with saved points. The best we can do is use the point from yesterday we are at now to be better for tomorrow.
As a certain redheaded supersoldier once said: “Your past doesn’t define who you are. It just gives you the starting point of who you’re going to be.”
Believe it or not, I’m no exception. Perhaps if I never fell for a two-faced girl who decided to disparage me with a racial slur then try to win me back years later, I never would have learned the caution and vulnerability that comes with falling in love. Or if I somehow found the cure to my depression, I would have been in a much better position than I am now. Because of that, I also spent a lot of time doing nothing but feeling sorry for myself, trying to escape reality and hurting myself and my relationships with people. Yet because I experienced all that, I now find myself wiser and stronger. And I’m telling you if you’re not there already, you can as well.
I ask, no, I challenge you to do the same. Because I know you can do it as well. Sure, it might take a bit, but remember, I’m not asking you to forget those events, I’m asking you to view them in a different light.
I believe in you.