Learning From the Past To Move Forward

A writer writes!

I was watching an interview of Allen Iverson, former NBA player for several teams.  The interviewer asked him that traditional question.  If he could do it all over again, what would he do differently?  To Allen's credit he responded that he would not change a thing.  I found that to be a very honest answer.

As people we are prone to make mistakes.  What kind of life would it be if we could call time out and go back in time to correct our mistakes.  Sure, some things would turn out better, but our lives would be far from human if we were perfect.  The movies "Groundhog Day" and "About Time" feature stories where the main character had the ability to go back in time and change events. Those films work from the premise that if we had the ability to change our actions, the actions of those we interact with would not change.  What if that person felt that their behavior wasn't perfect and they wanted to go back and change how they interacted with you?   Life could be a series of mid course corrections with each person or the person(s) they interacted with constantly "going back" to make changes.

In real life we have the ability to learn from past mistakes to avoid making the same mistake again. But, how many times do you in fact make the same mistake again?  Learning from the past gives us the ability to change our future behaviors.  But, our past does not prevent us from making future errors.  We all need to make a conscious decision to move forward in a different direction from past behaviors that resulted in negative results.

In your personal journey, try to avoid a series of repeat mistakes that lead to the same result.  It is  not as easy at it should be to avoid repeat disasters.  We still hold on to the belief that even though something turned out bad the first time, the second time all will be much better.