“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”
–Maria Robinson
Most of us have at least some regrets about things that have happened in the past, but there is nothing we can do to erase, or change, even a single day from the past. The past is over and done with, so we must live in the present and look to the future. No matter what happened in the past that is the source of our regrets, we should not allow it to ruin the rest of our lives. In the words of an anonymous writer, “If we fill our hours with regrets over the failures of yesterday, and with worries over the problems of tomorrow, we have no today in which to be thankful.”
Mark Twain said, “For most of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment.” If that is the case, let us focus on the experiment of the future–not the regret of the past. Some people have been victims of great injustice in the past. In recent years, the use of DNA testing has revealed that some prison inmates have served years behind bars for crimes that they did not commit. If you had served 20 years in prison for a crime that you did not commit, wouldn’t you be bitter once you were released? I certainly would. But I hope that I would not allow the suffering from the past to ruin the rest of my life. We can’t change the past, but we have a lot of influence over our future. If we are still following the same road that led to our present regrets, we can start in a new direction that is more likely to give us the ultimate ending we are seeking.
According to an old French proverb, “The first half of life is spent in longing for the second–the second half in regretting the first.” If our life fits into that category, and we have reached the midpoint of life, we can’t do anything about how we spent the first half of our life. But we certainly do not have to spend the second half regretting the first half. The best way to keep this from happening is to train ourselves to avoid looking back. No matter how painful the past has been, we don’t have to keep reliving it in our minds. If we have memories from the past that make us smile, it is OK to occasionally relive those memories. But painful memories from the past should be buried and kept buried.
Katherine Mansfield, a New Zealand writer who lived from 1888 to 1923, was emphatic about not looking back. She wrote, “Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy. You can’t build on it. It’s only good for wallowing in.”
Think about it.
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Copyright 2025
Allen W. Smith
