What's Past is Past

I was considering writing about the past in my blog today, then there was the heartbreaking end to the Superbowl (yes, I'm a Seahawks fan) last night. You see, I've never played sports and one of the reasons is that I can barely watch a game that I care about without getting overly nervous. When the competition ends in defeat I can just imagine the key players reliving that last agonizing moment when it could have gone either way over and over again. But, like Rafiki (from Lion King) says, "It doesn't matter, it's in the past." 

Agathon, a Greek poet, brings the past into reality when he says, "Of this alone, even God is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been." We cannot change the past, in fact, not even God can do that. So, when bad or scary things happen we tend to relive the moment considering how things could have been different. Yet, we simultaneously know there is nothing we can do to change what has already happened..

We truly only have two choices. Like Rafiki says next, "Oh yes, the past can hurt. But from the way I see it, you can either run from it, or . . . learn from it." Once we accept that there is nothing we can do to change what happened, we can decide how we are going to move forward, since "the past is in the past" ("Let It Go," Disney's Frozen).

William Glasser, psychologist, said, "What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today." So the trick is seeing those hurtful moments as opportunities to learn and grow. 

We need to take Mexican writer, Domenico Cieri Estrada's advice: "Bring the past only if you're going to build from it."