USE YOUR MISTAKES AS STEPPING STONES

Learning to stop carrying your mistakes around with you is one of the important lessons each of us must learn if we are going to move forward.

Instead of carrying them around, we should put them down and under our feet and use them as stepping stones.

In fact, the best thing we can do is put them down. Each of us knows they are heavy, especially if we have been carrying them around for a while. Because they are heavy to carry, they might as well be useful too. That is why I am suggesting we place them under our feet and use them to move forward and past them.

This will not happen however, until we consciously decide to put them down and stop carrying them around in our minds. Otherwise we will continue to let the past weigh us down every day and hold us back when we try to move forward.

To do this, each of us has to realize, how much time we waste when we don’t let the past go. Those things we consider we did wrong are worse than most of the things we remember in our memories about the way our lives unfolded in the course of living.

We may feel anger at ourselves, dismay or disgust, if we feel we were either foolish or did something we consider harmful to someone else or acted against our beliefs. Nevertheless, reliving some incident over and over again, isn’t going to make it go away. In fact, reliving something gives it power and time better spent moving forward.

I have noticed several times that something from the past has often been forgotten long ago by other people around me. In fact, something that bothers us so much, may not have made much of an impression on other people even at the time it occurred either. 

Even if something we did effected our lives in the past, and those of other people around us; most people have probably forgotten about it long ago. It is likely that it is only in our own mind that this ‘mistake’ still resonates and actively continues to bother us.

As we live our lives, each of us has a variety of experiences. Memories accompany each of them. Some of them are wonderful and happy ones; others are more like heavy baggage weighing us down. 

Each of us accumulates Baggage. However, if we don’t put it down, we become used to its weight. We carry it around with us as a part of our lives. We will never know what a welcome relief we would feel were we to put it down, if we don't let them go.

Perhaps by writing about this, you and I also, will unload some of the junk we are self-conscious about and have been needlessly weighing ourselves down with. By taking our ‘mistakes’ and putting them away with other things from the past, we can use them as something else we learned from life and remake them into stepping stones to move forward a little lighter.