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I was reading Wendy Piersall’s blog, emomsathome.com. She’s got a great post about what she would redo about her life if given the chance. She mainly focuses on two issues in her life.

The two main issues she talks about are lack of self-respect and lack of ambition. (She also talks about wishing she could have picked a different domain name, which makes sense to me because I read her blog even though I’m not a mom and I don’t work at home.)

All joking aside, Wendy’s post is very thought provoking. Also, it took a lot of guts to tell the whole planet about some of the issues she had to deal with when younger. She basically went through a longish period of self-hate.

Despite all of this, she says she doesn’t have any regrets.

It’s this idea that I’m going to flesh out here, that of not regretting what you’ve gone through to get where you are, because your past, your mistakes, all of the crap that happened to you is what made…you! And if you’re in a place where you value yourself today (and I hope you are) then what happened in the past turns out to have been beneficial.

I suspect I’m talking with two groups of people, those that like where they are today and those that don’t. This is not an either/or distinction. It’s more of a spectrum.

I hope for your sake you land toward the “I like myself” end of the spectrum. If you don’t maybe some ideas in this post will help you.

If you basically like yourself and where you are or at least the direction you’re headed in, no matter what you went through to get to this point was perfect.

Once you get through a bad part of your life and you’re looking back at it from the other side, usually you see at least the lessons that you learned. With time, the perfection of your life comes into a more focused view.

But what if there are still some problem areas in your life?

Either you are learning the lesson this life experience is trying to teach you or you’re not. If you are, then you should be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. If you’re not learning the lesson, then you are probably going to repeat this lesson in some form or other until you do. At least, that’s been my experience.

We tend to live our lives from the present forward.

I’ve noticed myself that I can heal the present, or at least part of it, if I revisit the past in my mind and understand its perfection.

Some of you are thinking something like: “You’re telling me having an alcoholic father was perfection? You’re out of your mind.”

(I’m using the alcoholic father as an example.)

Yes, I’m telling you that no matter what you went through it was perfect. It made you who you are.

If you don’t see your past as perfect, then I suspect somehow you’re living in the reflection of that imperfection in the present. Heal the past and you’ll heal the present.

How? You can’t turn back the clock and relive those painful years.

You don’t have to. What you have to do is change how you look at the pain. Reframe it as course correction, or lessons learned.

This might take some time, but hopefully you’ll be here next week, next month, next year anyway. So, why not be here happy, whole, and productive?

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Self-help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.